a study of motives and people

1
Indology and Indologists
A study in motives and people
Kosla Vepa PhD
Indic studies Foundation,
948 Happy Valley Rd.,
Pleasanton, Ca 94566.,USA
[email protected]
[email protected]
"Modern India will find her identity and the modern Indian will regain his soul when our
people begin to have some understanding of our priceless heritage. A nation which has had
a great past can look forward with confidence to a great future. It would be restorative to
national self-confidence to know that many discoveries of today are really re-discoveries
and represent knowledge which ancient India had at her command. World thinkers have
stood in marvel at the sublimity of our scriptures."
(source: Let's regain our lost soul - By Nani A Palkhivala - Tapovan Prasad - Chinmaya
Mission vol. 39 #2 February 2001p 29).
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(under construction)
Part I
It is taken as largely axiomatic in the study of the History of the Indic peoples1, that the civilization that remains extant has
been brought into the area by migrating races such as the Aryans , and in fact some would argue,that such a statement holds
also for the so called Dravidians of India. According to such a narrative everything that was worth preserving has been
handed down to us over the centuries by migrations, within the last 3 1/2 millennia, into the subcontinent, from somewhere
else. It is also true that the history that is taught the children of India today is vastly at variance with the puranic accounts
handed down to us over several millennia. It is to state it without any embellishments, a revised history that is completely at
odds with the traditional history of India. Even so great an effort as the History and Culture of the Indian people edited by RC
Majumdar, with the blessings of KM Munshi of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the most famous of Indian historians at the time
of Independence accepts the basic framework of the History of India as revised by the British colonialists. Fifty years after
independence the narrative has not changed and the banner of the colonial version of history is now borne by the Indian left
including the Communists and the rump of the Congress party left behind after successive defections from its fold and
whose only common ideology is the adulation of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty .
A substantial percentage of Indians now feel they have a stake in the preservation of this false history and when confronted
with the reality of their acquiescence to a false and revised history of their own land by a very recent arrival on the scene,
react with irrelevant responses such as “why blame the British” (the issue is not one of blame, for after all we are in great
admiration of the British for the extraordinary sagacity they displayed in prolonging their imperial rule by every artifice
imaginable). One possible reason for such a stance by the Indic in our view is the so called Societal Stockholm Syndrome,
which we have elaborated upon elsewhere. We have also dealt with the systematic approach that the British used to remake
the weltanshcuung of the indic and to create an international image of the Indic that is much at variance with reality , and the
success they achieved in the resulting internalization of these views by the Indic himself in our essay titled the South Asia
File.
1
We will define the adjective Indic (as in Indic civilization) to be inclusive of all the people who derived their civilization from the
Dhaarmic traditions of the Indian subcontinent.. For the most part we willll restrict ourselves to the subset of those residing in the
subcontinent including most of present day Afghanistan and some eastem regions of present day Iran
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In this monograph we will study the motivations of 2 classes of individuals.. One category belonged who made it a lifelong
passion to study the Indic people and their achievements in sciences and the arts and in the process undertook a
dangerous and long journey in order to satisfy their curiosity. The other category belongs to those who were influenced
considerably by the work of the Indic ancients. The study is startling in that the current disdain with which the Indic is held in
the post colonial era is a development that occurred mainly in the last 200 years and that for most of our recorded history the
Indic has been held in high esteem by the denizens of the globe. It appears the British had no small part in assiduously
cultivating such a picture of the Indic. We say this because substantial numbers of scholars from Britain have expressed their
disdain for the contributions of the Indics in unequivocal terms. But the pattern of spending a lifetime studying the Indics for
a lifetime and imbibing their knowledge and then subsequently belittling their achievements was first exhibited by the
Afghan scholar Al Biruni ( a very rare instance of such behavior in the ancient and medieval world) is more prevalent in recent
times. To the extent that these contributions of the ancient Indics are held in high esteem by the occidentals, after the advent
of colonial conquest, it is because it was understood that these were contributions made by the so called Aryans
immediately after arrival in the subcontinent and that such a creative and inventive spark was extinguished shortly thereafter
. To quote W W Rouse Ball, the historian of mathematics2
“The Arabs had considerable commerce with India, and a knowledge of one or both of the two great Hindoo works on algebra
had been obtained in the Caliphate of Al-Mansur (754-775 AD)though it was not until fifty or seventy years later that they
attracted much attention. The algebra and arithmetic of the Arabs were largely founded on these treatises, and I therefore
devote this section to the consideration of Hindoo mathematics.The Hindoos like the Chinese have pretended that they are
the most ancient people on the face of the earth, and that to them all sciences owe their creation. But it is probable that these
pretensions have no foundation; and in fact no science or useful art (except a rather fantastic architecture and sculpture) can
be definitely traced back to the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula prior to the Aryan invasion. This seems to have taken place
at some time in the fifth century or in the sixth century when a tribe of Aryans entered India by the North West part of their
country. Their descendants, wherever they have kept their blood pure, may still be recognized by their superiority over the
races they originally conquered; but as is the case with the modern Europeans, they found the climate trying and gradually
degenerated”
2
4
W W. Rouse Ball in 'A short account of the History of mathematics' Dover Publications,1960, (originally appeared in 1908, page.146
We remind our readers that such a sentiment was expressed as late as the beginning of the 20th century, after the
renaissance and the enlightenment.
In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentalists have
concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote the Aryabhata group from
the University of Exeter at Exeter in the UK in a paper delivered by Dennis Almeida, titled “Transmission of calculus from
Kerala to the west”
“However, we are aware that for some unfathomable reasons, the standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of
transmission of knowledge from east to west, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of
transmission of knowledge from West to East. Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable
case for transmission from west to East, but priority and definite contact never seems to establish an acceptable case for
transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered
independently. Hence we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we
propose to test the hypothesis on the grounds of motivation, opportunity, circumstantial evidence and documentary
evidence”
Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of
the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pongee’s PhD thesis titled “Materials for the Transmission of
Greek astrology to India”. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that
needs not to be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer in your initial assumptions and
then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact
We begin our story by turning our attention to the question of why India has been a subject of such intense interest at least
over the prolonged period of over 2 millennia.
Why was India such a subject of intense study for over a period of 2 millennia?
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India has been a subject of exhaustive study and ubiquitous interest to a wide variety of peoples from all corners of the
ancient and the modern world throughout the millennia. To begin with we like to understand the various motives behind this
intense interest. Was it merely intellectual curiosity? Was it really the intention to study these subjects in order that they may
be critiqued extensively and then rubbished as inconsequential to the progress of humankind ? Was it a curiosity into the
origins of the European languages and history, given that the oldest and most prolific literature of antiquity was in Sanskrit
and Pali? We feel the answers were unique to each individual. But certain patterns are emerging among indologists
particularly of British and German origin.
There are many reasons for this intense and sustained interest, not least among them being the considerable prowess of the
ancient Indic in matters of scholarship, relating to the exact sciences. The Indian university system of the ancient era was
world renowned and attracted student from a wide variety of countries. They were strung across the northern Indo Gangetic
plain starting from Takshashila on the western end to the famed universities of Nalanda, Odantipura and Vikramshila in
present day Bihar
Indology is a name given by Indologists to the academic study of the history, languages, the sciences and cultures of the
Indian subcontinent. Strictly speaking it encompasses the study of the languages, scripts of all of Asia that was influenced by
Indic culture. As one can imagine this encompasses almost all of present day Asia except perhaps the very northernmost
reaches of Siberia. Indology as viewed by its practitioners in Europe and America is analogous to Entomology, the science of
insects, in more ways than one. In both instances the subjects of the study have little say in the matter and the scope of the
study. The study is always carried out to be of benefit to the people who undertake the study and there is little or no benefit to
the subject of the study who may end up sacrificing his life for the ’cause’. Indological studies or the study of the Indic people
in a scholarly and serious manner can be broken up into 6 major categories in some cases with overlapping time periods.
Regions of the world where interest in Indic studies was predominant
1. Babylonian and Greek (2500 BCE to 150 BCE). The Semitic and Mediterranean world had ubiquitous contacts
with the Indic. We are in the long drawn out process of researching this phase of Indology. Our knowledge of the
facts, are meager at the moment. But the more we learn about the Greeks , the more it is apparent that they
learned a lot of their sciences from the Indian subcontinent
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This came to a virtual stop during the heyday of the Roman Empire when it became the paramount Mediterranean
power after the fall of Carthage. Rome remained a major trading partner of India but ceased to be interested in
Indic scholarship. The Byzantines or the Eastern Empire centered in Constantinople, even though it has sufficient
contacts ceased to evince interest after the advent of the adoption of Christianity, as India came to be associated
increasingly with the Pagan practices that they were trying hard to extinguish in Europe.
2. China and the Sinic Civilization. (2500 BCE – 1200 CE) The interaction between the Indic and Sinic civilizations
has been one of long standing, reaching back to the ancient era, and it has been a two way street, contrary to
popular misconceptions. The interaction has been ubiquitous and consistent. India has borrowed much from the
Sinic civilization ranging from the mundane to the sublime and vice versa. There is much work yet to be done to
study the extent of this interaction, an area that was merely of tertiary interest to the European
3. Arab and Non Arab Islamic studies of India (most of the Islamic savants who studied India did not speak Arabic
as their native tongue, but were descended from converted central Asian and Indic civilizations (700 CE to 1200
CE). In fact it can safely be said that the Arab savants had enormous respect for the capabilities of the Indics as
did the Greeks like Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyanneous before them. The glaring exception to this
statement is the cognitive dissonance exhibited by Al Biruni , the most well known amongst the Islamic
indologists, who spent a considerable portion of his life in India while expressing scathing contempt and
stereotyping of Hindus in his remarks about Indians in general. That there is a contradiction between spending a
great portion of one life learning from a people and then trashing them unequivocally does not seem to bother
AlBiruni. Furthermore , Al Biruni even though a native of Khorasan (Khwaresm), was raised in Ghazni and spoke
a dialect of Farsi known as Dari, which is spoken even today in Afghanistan. These areas of Afghanistan were
in fact freshly Islamized after the last of the Hindu Shahi Kingdoms were defeated not very much earlier. The
point being Al Biruni was no stranger to Hindu scholarship or culture prior to coming to India. Such an attitude of
studied indifference and condescension even after a lifetime of imbibing Indic knowledge,became more and more
prevalent after the advent of the colonial era and the norm rather than the exception .
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The scholarly exchanges with the Khilafat came to a halt after the sack of Baghdad and Damascus by Hulagu, the
grandson of the Mongol Great Khan Chinghiz, the most victorious conqueror of all time. It was also severely
impacted when vast numbers of Indics were taken in slavery, especially able bodied men and women, and those
with skills in the arts and sciences and equally large numbers were killed at the rate of 100,000 a day during and
after a battle. So great were the numbers of Indian slaves who flooded the slave markets of Damascus that the
price of slaves dropped dramatically and would seriously impact the economics of slavery as a profitable
activity. Some have estimated the sustained decimation of the Indic population over the 5 centuries of Islamic
domination of the subcontinent to be in the neighborhood of over 70 million people and for the first time India,
always a highly densely populated country in relative terms to the rest of the globe, suffered a drop in
population. The scholars retreated farther and farther to the south until they reached Kerala, which is where the
Kerala School of astronomy and mathematics flourished for at least 300 years, producing such stalwarts as
Nilakanta Somayaji, till the 1700’s
4. Pre- British colonial Catholic church dominated study of India. It may be surprising to learn that one of the first
pioneers in European Indology was the 12th Century Pope, Honorius IV. Then as now, the primary focus of the
study was not the scientific acquisition of knowledge but to arm themselves with enough facts to be able to
convert the Indic population to Christianity.
5. British colonial Indology (1780 CE – 2000 CE) which was in reality dominated by German scholars. Interest in
Indology only took shape and concrete direction after the British came to India, with the advent of the discovery
of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones in the 1770’s. Other names for Indology are Indic studies or Indian studies or
South Asian studies.
The extraordinary level of interest by German scholars in Indic matters is a very interesting narrative in its own
right and we need to reflect upon the highlights of this phenomenon. The German speaking people experienced a
vast increase in intellectual activity at about the same time that Britain colonized India. We do not understand
the specific factors that came into play during this time, other than to remark on the tremendous intellectual
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ferment that was running concurrently during the French revolution, and the keen interest that Napoleon showed
in matters scientific including the contributions of the orient. Clearly the remarks that Sir William made about
Sanskrit as well as the high-level of interest that he provoked in the Sanskrit language, contributed to the overall
sense of excitement. But why was it Germany and not Britain as the center of research on the Oriental
contributions. The answer lies in the intense search for nationhood that was under way in Germany during that
period. When Sanskrit was discovered, and it dawned on the Germans that the antiquity of Sanskrit was very
great, and that Sanskrit and German were somehow related, the Germans suddenly had an answer to the
question of their own ethnic and linguistic origins. Sir Henry Maine an influential Anglo Indian scholar and former
Vice Chancellor of Calcutta university, who was also on the Viceroys council, pronounced a view that many
Englishman shared about the unification of Germany.
A nation has been born out of Sanskrit
From the beginning, the great interest that Germany showed in Sanskrit had to do with their own obsessions and
questions regarding their ethnic and linguistic origins. It had very little or at least far less to do with the origin of
the ancient Indic, about whom they had considerably less interest. And yet, that does not stop the proponents of
the AIT in India, whose knowledge of Eiropean history appears to be rudimentary at best, from asserting that AIT
is an obsession of nationalistic Hindus.Such is the fate and the perversion of history that conquered nations can
aspire to Different aspects of this fascinating chapter, on the postulation of an Aryan race and its corollaries the
Indo European, Indo German are described for instance by various authors Trautmann3, Rajaram4 and Arvidson5.
The interesting but curious aspect of this phenomena is t hath while the concept of the Aryan race has pretty
much been discarded by most of the modern generation of the European world, It lingers on in the narrative of
Indian History, a relic of the heyday of Europe’ s dominance on the world scene, when racist theories were
abundant to explain this dominance as being a consequence of their heritage as an Aryan people
3
4
5
Trautmann, Thomas, “Aryans and British india”, 1997, University of California press
Rajaram, Navaratna “The Politics of History, Voice of India, 1995
Stefan Arvidsson 2006:38 Aryan Idols
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One of the criticisms leveled at the new breed of Indian historians who wish to uncover the authentic history of
India after the morass of inconsistencies to which it has sunk is that they are motivated by political
considerations and the further charge is made that they are ‘nationalistic’. Apart from the question of any
violation of ethics by being nationalistic not being apparent to me, this is to us a perplexing charge to make since
it is apparent that political motivations have been always dominant in the pursuit of Indological studies during
the colonial era, right from the outset since the time of Sir William Jones, when he discovered the existence of
Sanskrit. One such political motivation was the need for the European to define his identity outside the
framework of Semitic traditions which dominated the religious life of Europe. The notion that the North European
Viking owed much of his civilization to the Mediterranean Semite was not palatable to most of the elite among the
countries of Northern lands of Europe for reasons which we do not have the time to go into now. So, the
discovery of Sanskrit was accompanied by a big sigh of relief that the languages of Europe did not after all derive
from Hebrew but from an ancestor language which was initially assumed to be Sanskrit. In the immediate
aftermath of the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, there was a great gush of admiration and worship of
the sublime nature of the Sanskrit texts such as Sakuntala. But as the European realized that the present day
practitioners of Sanskrit were not blonde and blue eyed (remember ideas of racial superiority were dominant in
18th century Europe despite the advent of the enlightenment and the renaissance) this was found to be equally
unpalatable.
The European indologist therefore came upon the ingenious explanation that the Sanskritic culture of the
subcontinent was not native to the subcontinent but was impregnated by a small band of nomadic Viking like
marauders who then proceeded to transform themselves within the short space of 200 years into the intellectual
class of India. This hypothesis (because that is what it was) had of course no basis in fact, but it served the
purpose and killed several birds with one stone. It denied India the autocthonous legacy of the dominant culture
of the subcontinent, and helped create a schism in the Indian body politic, and further implied that the native
Indics were incapable of original thought and certainly were not capable of producing a language like Sanskrit. It
filled the obsessive need during those decades that the European had for an ancestor that was not Semitic in
origin. Lo and behold the ancestor did not come from India but from a long lost Shangrila of whom there were no
survivors (so that their hypothesis could never be contradicted). Thus was born the mythical Aryan, whose only
qualification was that he should hail from a land that was anywhere but India, preferably from a region not very
densely inhabited or conscious of their antiquity. Further it gave the excuse for the British to claim that they were
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indeed the later day version of the Aryans destined to lord it over lesser, more unfortunate people by reason of
the fact that they were Aryans. See for instance (Trautmann (1997) or Chakrabarti (1997))
In short, the study of India, during the colonial era has always been accompanied by a healthy dose of imperialist
dogma and by disdain for a people who they felt could so easily be vanquished in battle by handful of
Englishmen. This is in addition to the normal human tendency to exhibit a degree of the NIH syndrome (Not
Invented Here). This is a train of thought that needs to be explored further, but we do not wish to be sidetracked
from the main topic. We hasten to add that the fundamental scholarly impulse and intellectual curiosity that
drives most scholars still motivates a substantial section of the indologists, despite much pressure from
European academia to toe the line. But this stream of objective scholars died out pretty soon after and became
almost extinct in the nineteenth century, and in general, with a few exceptions amongst the French, the European
Indologists toed the party line that Indic contributions were shallow and insubstantial
In fact the British presence in India was steadily increasing long before the Battle of Plassey in 1757 CE, but so
great was the insularity of the colonial overlord that it took almost three hundred years for a scholar like Sir
William to show up in India after Vasco da Gama landed of the coast of Goa in 1492 CE, and notice the
similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages.
But the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William and the coming of the British had a terminally fatal effect on the
conduct of scientific studies in India. It cut off the Indic from his own native source of traditional learning and
replaced it with the traditions of a land far away with which he had no physical contact, and could not relate, with
the result that literacy fell to 6% at the turn of the 20th century . Education was tightly controlled by the
government and all support to schools that did not teach English was summarily stopped, except in states that
were ruled by a local Maharajah such as Travancore Cochin, Baroda and Mysore. India was turned into a vast
Gulag where no ideas other than those of the British were allowed to penetrate and Indian were effectively barred
from traveling to foreign lands, except on a one way trip to a distant land as indentured labor, lest they return
with the subversive notions of freedom and democracy which as Churchill remarked on more than one occasion
were not applicable to the subject populations of their Colonies. So great was the travel restriction that the Indic
internalized this consequence of the rule of the Colonial Overlord, to be a characteristic of the assumed native
propensity to aversion of adventure and exploration. There was no money allocated for research and no
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encouragement of savants, who had little opportunity to pursue further research. So the steady supply of Indic
scientists which lasted till about 1780 CE finally died out and Indic science was almost extinguished from the
land.
This is not to say that there have been no benefits accrued from the change in the medium of instruction to
English. Due to the fortuitous circumstance that a substantial part of the new world now spoke English, placed
Indic youngsters at an advantageous situation when it came to getting admission to graduate studies in North
America. This coupled with the investment in higher education made by Jawaharlal Nehru India’s first Prime
Minister catapulted India into the leadership ranks of countries who were players in the new Information
Technology. But the negatives remain. The vast majority of the Indian population are not participants in this new
bounty, because they do not have the access to the expensive schools that purvey access to such an education.
The most telling impact of the newly coined endeavor called philology , that was the result of this unwanted
gush of attention engendered ever since the discovery of Sanskrit, was the manner in which the Indic was
viewed by the rest of the world and even more importantly the internalization of the British and European view of
India by the average literate English educated Indic. Till then the Indic was widely respected throughout the world
and his geographical origin was synonymous with scholarship. Today, it is commonplace in India to deride
somebody who expresses pride in his tradition and his civilization as being jingoistic. The Colonial overlord went
to extraordinary lengths to undermine the Civilizational commonalities amongst the people of India by variousw
an diverse means. Anything that had a negative impact was played to the hilt. The antiquity of Indian history was
systematically whittled away and the new dates had to conform to the notion that Indid not cotnribiute anything
opf value to civilization an dtha thall she know in the area of science and mathematics, was learned from the
Greeks. The Indian was uniformly characterized as a shiftless indolent with very few redeeming qualities
So great was the change and so lasting in its effect that today vast numbers of Indian youth have almost the
same opinion of India and Indic traditions that the Colonial overlords had, of India in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century. There has been a massive change in the psyche of the Indic, much of it for the worse, a fact
that was brought out in vivid portrayals by V S Naipaul when he coined the phrase ‘the wounded civilization’ in
his references to the subcontinent.
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Examples of the internalization of the European views of India abound in India today. Even eminent Indian
historians like RC Majumdar have expressed some of these views in writing without substantiating how they
arrived at such conclusions. We give below a sample. It is ironic that these viewpoints are usually expressed by
Indics rather than non Indics.
The Indic is inherently incapable of adventurous behavior and will not venture beyond the confines of the Indian
subcontinent (Kaalapaani syndrome)
The Indic is incapable of original, rational and creative ideas. The Indic is incapable of independent thinking and
is unquestioning in his adherence to authoritarian diktats such as those in the Vedic texts and is only capable of
rote learning(presuming it is conceded that the Indic is capable of learning at all.)
The caste system is an artifact of the Indic religious belief system, and that the Indic is inherently opposed to
egalitarian ideas and is wedded to the racial and ethnic stratification of his own society.
The Indic is especially unique and egregious in the manner in which he exploits his fellow Indics
The indic is fundamentally not tuned to making progress and advancing in the modern world, and is lost in an
ancient mind set
Everything good and worthwhile in the Indian subcontinent has been imported by the invaders, and the only
indigenous characteristics are those like caste that are inherent to the Indic civilization.
The Indic is fatalistic and will not make an effort to change his destiny which is written in stone the moment he is
born
The Indic is lazy and indolent
The Indic has no sense of history and is even poorer at keeping records of his historical past
As a consequence of the above the Indic is socially backward, possibly morally corrupt and perennially hence
dependent upon Westernization to reform the current problems in Indian society.
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The germ of such a vast change in psyche was the goal of Thomas Babington Macaulay and he would have been
rather pleased to see the consequences of his minute on education where he proposed changing the medium of
instruction to English in the 1830’s in order to produce a class of Brown Englishman who would occupy
positions intermediate between those of the Colonial overlords and the unwashed masses of the subcontinent.
In the same vein, HH Wilson, the first occupant of the Boden Chair in Sanskrit, wrote as follows,
“From the survey which has been submitted to you, you will perceive that the practical religion of the Hindus is
by no means a concentrated and compact system, but a heterogeneous compound made up of various and not
infrequently incompatible ingredients, and that to a few ancient fragments it has made large and unauthorized
additions, most of which are of an exceedingly mischievous and disgraceful nature. It is, however, of little avail
yet to attempt to undeceive the multitude; their superstition is based upon ignorance, and until the foundation is
taken away, the superstructure, however crazy and rotten, will hold together.”
Power over a vast area like India does strange things to people, one of which is the loss of ‘common sense’ , not
to mention the loss of humility, and one can see the process of creating the mythological Indian has already
begun as early as 1833, the process of remaking the Indic mindset had commenced in earnest.
6. Indic studies by native Indics when the Indic tradition miraculously resurrected itself shortly after the beginning
of the twentieth century from an almost comatose condition (1900 CE to the present)
So we come to the sixth and current period of Indological studies. The European, with few exceptions continued
to study the Indic past as if the present day practitioners did not exist. In this the indologists tried to emulate
Egyptology and the study of Meso American civilizations. In both these instances, the Europeans could say
anything they liked without being challenged by survivors of the tradition and get away with it, because there
were no survivors after the routine scourging of native populations using the well entrenched twin techniques first with the sword and then the Holy book to erase all prior traditions, as well as inflicting upon them diseases
which effectively decimated their populations. They studied India in the same vein, making untenable
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assumptions and hypothesis and then indulged in circular arguments that anything that does not fit the
assumption is invalid
But the Hindu is a strange creature, imbued with the genetic longevity of the cockroach and the intellectual
hardiness that comes from millennia of tradition devoted to scholarship. Indics were the first to codify the
principle of acquisition of knowledge known now by the name of epistemology and they resisted the imposition
of a history and a narrative that was substantially at variance from their Puranic traditions. These principles of
acquisition of knowledge are alluded to in my booklet on Dhaarmik traditions and include Perception and
Observation (Pratyaksha), Anumaana (inference), Comparison and Analogy (Upamaana), shabda ( acceptance,
though not necessarily uncritical acceptance, of the Word as manifested in the ancient scriptures, Arthapaati
(implication) and anupalabdi (non apprehension and skepticism in the face of non-apprehension).
The systematic approach, combined with the methodology of learning recommended by the Upanishads namely,
the triune method of shravana, manana and nididhyasana forms the core of the approach to all kinds of
knowledge , whether It be Paara Vidya or Apaara Vidya (see Glossary). The term Shravana refers basically to
hearing, but also includes reading, discussions and the like. Manana is contemplation of what has been studied
or heard. Nididhyasana is concentration on the subject to the exclusion of everything else. It may not always be
possible or advisable to practice multitasking, which has become de rigueur in this age of rapid technological
change. Usually, the initial knowledge about anything has to be acquired through a guru, because he is the
dependable authority on the subject. Manana and Nididhyasana depend on one’s own effort, with some guidance
from the guru. The role of the teacher is only as a guidepost. The journey has to be undertaken by us with our
own efforts.
It is this comprehensive approach to the acquisition of knowledge that has given the edge to the Hindu vis a vis
other civilizations over the millennia and is catalyzing the reclamation of the high ground in the field of Indic
studies. This is not to say that the Modern Indic should ignore the work done by others in this field , but it does
mean the converse that indologists outside India, can no longer ignore the legitimate claims to scholarship of
Indic savants in the study of their own History. Let us hope that as we go from here that he, the Western
Indologist will abandon the politically motivated approach that he has taken till hitherto and will accord the
discerning Indic savant the same consideration and apply objective criteria to the studies undertaken by those
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who are not of a European background. Certainly it means that he should eschew the use of the convenient and
stereotypical characterization of anything that he does not like as being a product or a conspiracy of the
Hindutva or a Hindu nationalist.
In reality, there is a basic contradiction in the western characterization of the Hindu and the pejorative use of the
word Hindu nationalist. The Hindu faith or Sanaatana Dharma has often been characterized in my view with
adequate justification, as being too eclectic and all encompassing. In fact in the quote above Hayman Wilson
characterizes it as being ‘heterogeneous and contradictory’. And yet, there is the constant and ubiquitous
drumbeat in the use of the word Hindu nationalist, which implies an exclusionary stance and narrow
mindedness. To the followers of Plato and Socrates in the Occidental world, I ask, well, which is it, eclectic and
all encompassing weltanschuung, or exclusionist and narrow minded.
Eurocentrism and Mathematics
For some their Eurocentrism (or Graeco-centrism) is so deeply entrenched that they cannot bring themselves to face the idea
of independent developments in early Indian mathematics, even as a remote possibility. Thhhe following passages
quotedfrom Gheverghese’s The crest of the Peacock,
“A good illustration of this blinkered vision is provided by a widely respected historian of mathematics at the turn of this
century, Paul Tannery. Confronted with the evidence from Arab sources that the Indians were the first to use the sine function
as we know it today, Tannery devoted himself to seeking ways in which the Indians could have acquired the concept from the
Greeks. For Tannery, the very fact that the Indians knew and used sines in their astronomical calculations was sufficient
evidence that they must have had it from the Greeks. But why this tunnel vision? The following quotation from G. R. Kaye
(1915) is illuminating:
"The achievements of the Greeks in mathematics and art form the most wonderful chapters in the history of civilization, and
these achievements are the admiration of western scholars. It is therefore natural that western investigators in the history of
knowledge should seek for traces of Greek influence in later manifestations of art, and mathematics in particular."
16
It is particularly unfortunate that Kaye is still quoted as an authority on Indian mathematics. Not only did he devote much
attention to showing the derivative nature of Indian mathematics, (Attempts to show the derivative nature of Indian sciences,
and especially its supposed Greek roots, continue even today. For example, David Pingree has prepared a chronology of
Indian astronomy which is notable for the absence of any Indian presence!) usually on dubious linguistic grounds (his
knowledge of Sanskrit was such that he depended largely on indigenous ‘pandits’ for translations of primary sources), but he
was prepared to neglect the weight of contemporary evidence and scholarship to promote his own viewpoint. So while
everyone else claimed that The Bakhshali Manuscript was written or copied from an earlier text dating to the first few
centuries of the Common era, Kaye insisted that it was no older than the 12th century A.D. Again, while the Arab sources
unanimously attributed the origin of our present-day numerals to the Indians, Kaye was of a different opinion. And the
distortions that resulted from Kaye’s work have to be taken seriously because of his influence on Western historians of
mathematics, many of whom remained immune to findings which refuted Kaye’s inferences and which established the
strength of the alternative position much more effectively than is generally recognized.
This tunnel vision is not confined to mathematics alone. Surprised at the accuracy of information on the preparation of alkalis
contained in an early Indian textbook on medicine (Susruta Samhita) dating to few centuries BCE, the eminent chemist and
historian of the subject, Marcelin Berthelot (1827-1909) suggested that this was a later insertion, after the Indians had come
into contact with European chemistry!
This Eurocentric tendency has done more harm, because it rode upon the political domination imposed by the West, which
imprinted its own version of knowledge on the rest of the world. “
The geographical location of India made her throughout history an important meeting-place of nations and cultures. This
enabled her from the very beginning to play an important role in the transmission and diffusion of ideas. The traffic was often
two-way, with Indian ideas and achievements traveling abroad as easily as those from outside entered her own
consciousness. Archaeological evidence shows both cultural and commercial contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus
valley. Certain astronomical calculations of the longest and shortest day included in the Vedanga Jyotisa, the oldest extant
Indian astronomical text, have close parallels with those used Mesopotamia.
Some sources even credit Pythagoras with having traveled as far as India in search of knowledge, which may explain some of
the close parallels between Indian and Pythagorean philosophy and religion. These parallels include:
17
a. a belief in the transmigration of souls;
b. the theory of four elements constituting matter;
c. the structure of the religio-philosophical character of the Pythagorean fraternity, which resembled Buddhist monastic
orders; and
d. the contents of the mystical speculations of the Pythagorean schools, which bear a striking resemblance of the Hindu
Upanishads.
According to Greek tradition, Pythagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and others undertook journey to the
East to study philosophy and science. By the time Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome’s Eastern empire had established themselves
just before the beginning of the Common era, Indian civilization was already well developed, having founded three great
religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – and expressed in writing the massive literature (of the Veda, the Brahmanas,
the Upanishads, the Purana,) as well as fundamental theories in science and medicine. There are scattered references to
Indian science in the literary sources from countries to the west of India after the time of Alexander. In a letter Aristotle wrote
to his pupil Alexander in India, he warns of the danger posed by intimacy with a ‘poison-maiden’, who had been fed on poison
from her infancy so that she could kill merely by her embrace!
(source: The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of Mathematics - By George Gheverghese Joseph p. 1 - 18 and 215 216
What are the major contentions and the resulting contradictions in the Western chronology of India
The inherent contradictions of the Aryan Invasion Theory by the mythic and yet to be identified Aryan race
The insistence that Indic astronomy , geometry and mathematics was not autochthonous to India but was
borrowed from the Greek or the Babylonians
18
The origin of the Brahmi script is a victim of the ‘anywhere but India’ syndrome
Devaluation and denigration of the extent of the ancient Indic contribution to Mathematics and Astronomy
Dating of the mahabharata
Dating of the Satapatha Brahmana
Dating of the Veda
Dating of the Vedanga Jyotisha
Dating of the Sulva sutras
The beginning of the Vikrama era
The dating of the Buddha
The dating of the Arthashastra
The dating of Chandragupta Maurya
The dating of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and consequentially the dating of Panini himself
The dating of Aryabhata
There are resulting inconsistencies in the chronology of the Indic historical narrative,, whcich is now horribly
mangled to fit the straightjacket of britiish assumptions
In discussing the individuals , one is struck by the generally . high intellectual caliber of the scholars who form
ther bulk of the Indologists. And yet a very high percentage were loathe to discard the prevalent racist dogma
of the day , that the Indics were incapable of a high level of intellectual effort and that therefore the only
explanation (of the high level of civilization in the Indian subcontinent relative to the rest of the ancient world)
was that such a circumstance could only have been possible if an alien civilization had transplanted it from
somewhere else the and were unable to free themselves of the racial prejudice that the Indic was incompetent to
make these discoveries
19
Part II The people who studied India from the ancient era
Explanatory notes : The dates associated with most of these gentlemen should be regarded only as approximate
at least to the nearest decade, as there were no accurate birth records prior to the 18th century. Unlike in ancient
India where a birth was sometimes recorded with the appropriate nakshatra, tithi, maasa and samvatsara , such
access to a calendar was not easily available to the ordinary folk in Europe till well into the enlightenment . A
such the birthdates of most European individuals other than royalty, prior to the nineteenth century, must be
regarded with circumspection and merely as an approximation.
One final comment before we begin. It is estimated that the total manuscript wealth available in India today is in
the order of 5 million according to the National Mission for Manuscripts was established in February 2003, by the
Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India. A unique project in its programme and mandate, the
Mission seeks to unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India. India possesses an estimate of five
million manuscripts, probably the largest collection in the world. These cover a variety of themes, textures and
aesthetics, scripts, languages, calligraphies, illuminations and illustrations. Together, they constitute the
‘memory' of India's history, heritage and thought. These manuscripts lie scattered across the country and
beyond, in numerous institutions as well as private collections, often unattended and undocumented. The
National Mission for Manuscripts aims to locate, document, preserve and render these accessible—to connect
India's past with its future, its memory with its aspirations. The electronic catalogue or database contains data on
about three hundred thousand (300,000) manuscripts, and the database is steadily increasing day by day.
This is the case despite heavy losses due to wars, destruction and natural decay. Out of this staggering number
about 1 million have been catalogued in India and perhaps another 200,00 abroad in various libraries such as
the Bodleian Libray in Oxford. This by far the largest extant literature from the ancient world for any civilization.
There is nothing even remotely comparable anywhere else. In one field alone, namely astronomy, the late David
Pingree found so many manuscripts that he called the resulting effort at cataloguing a Census.
20
The DeviMahatmya MS in Sanskrit, an example of a manuscript on palm-leaf, Bihar or Nepal, 11th c., 32 ff., 5x31 cm, 2
columns, (3x27 cm), 5 lines in an early Bhujimol script, borders marked with double lines with orange pigmentation between
lines, 1 miniature in text.
Binding: Nepal, 11th c., carved wooden covers, decorated with 10 miniatures, poti with hole for the binding cord.
Provenance: 1. Monastery in Nepal (ca. 11th c.-); 2. Sam Fogg cat. 17(1996):40.
It is no wonder that scholars have found the study of India to be such a fertile field and continue to find it so even today.
21
0
1
Babylonian, Chinese
Greek Indologists
2
ITsing
22
Brief description
N Name
o
.
and
3
Pythagoras
of
(560BC - 480BC)
Samos
"Through Vibration comes
Motion
Through
Motion
comes
Color
Through Color comes Tone"
He was a Greek philosopher who was responsible for important developments in
the history of mathematics, astronomy, and the theory of music. He founded the
Pythagorean Brotherhood and formulated principles that influenced the thoughts
of Plato and Aristotle. The influence of Pythagoras is so widespread, and coupled
with the fact that no writings of Pythagoras exist today,
He traveled widely in his youth with his father Mnesarchus, who was a gem
merchant from Tyre. His family settled in the homeland of his mother, Pythais, on
the island of Samos, where he studied with the philosopher Pherekydes. He was
introduced to mathematical ideas and astronomy by Thales, and his pupil
Anaximander in Miletus when he was between 18 and 20 years old. Thales advised
Pythagoras to travel to Egypt to learn more of these subjects. Leaving Miletus,
Pythagoras went first to Sidon, where he was initiated into the mysteries of Tyre
and Byblos. It is claimed that Pythagoras went onto Egypt with a letter of
introduction written by Polycrates, making the journey with some Egyptian sailors
who believed that a god had taken passage on their ship. Arriving in Egypt,
Pythagoras tried to gain entry into the Mystery Schools of that country. He applied
again and again, but he was told that unless he goes through a particular training
of fasting and breathing, he cannot be allowed to enter the school. Pythagoras is
reported to have said, " I have come for knowledge, not any sort of discipline." But
the school authorities said," we cannot give you knowledge unless you are
different. And really, we are not interested in knowledge at all, we are interested in
actual experience. No knowledge is knowledge unless it is lived and experienced.
So you will have to go on a 40 day fast, continuously breathing in a certain
manner, with a certain awareness on certain points." After 40 days of fasting and
breathing, aware, attentive, he was allowed to enter the school at Diospolis. It 23
is
said that Pythagoras said,"You are not allowing Pythagoras in. I am a different
man, I am reborn. You were right and I was wrong, because then my whole
standpoint was intellectual. Through this purification, my center of being has
changed. Before this training I could only understand through the intellect,
through the head. Now I can feel. Now truth is not a concept to me, but a life."
Some say that Pythagoras had been to India as part of his travels through Persia
and Babylon. There seem to be reasons not to scoff at such a claim. The main
reason being that much of his interest in numbers is not all that dissimilar to the
4
Alexander’s Invasion of The invasion of India by Alexander while not directly connected with Indology, is
India. The defeat of Puru indeed a very curious episode in Indic History which has a bearing on the
and the crossing of the chronology of India. First and foremost , there is clearly no record of his invasion
in any accounts of Indian history. He appears to have fought a minor Baron or
Indus.
regional Governor or Satrap of the Chakravarti by the name of Puru, who
administered a region near present day Takshashila, if we are to believe the
accounts of the Greeks. Now who were these Greek historians who reported on
the victory of Alexander. The recounting is done by Strabo and Arrian (Arrian was
a proconsul in the employ of the Roman empire and lived 400 years after the
advent of Alexander’s expedition) as well as Pliny and Plutarch. They were
certainly not present at the time of the battle, but relied on the descriptions given
by Alexander’s companions, Onesecritus, Aristibulus and his admiral Nearchus .In
what follows we give the gist of the Western acccount of the event. It is incredible
that very few western authors have bothered to check the account of the Greek
invasion in the Indian historical record and if they did they rarely report that they
found little or nothing. This is especially curious because the English historians
based their entire chronology on the date of Alexander’s battles and on the
second hand description of Megasthenes, the Seleucid Greek ambassador who
came to the court of Chandragupta, shortly after Alexander died and Seleucus
Nicator took over the Eastern part of Alexander’s empire
From Wiki
24
After the death of Spitamenes and his marriage to Roxana (Roshanak in Bactrian)
to cement his relations with his new Central Asian satrapies, in 326 BC Alexander
was finally free to turn his attention to the Indian subcontinent. Alexander invited
all the chieftains of the former satrapy of Gandhara, in the north of what is now
Pakistan, to come to him and submit to his authority. Ambhi (Greek: Omphis),
ruler of Taxila, whose kingdom extended from the Indus to the Jhelum
(Greek:Hydaspes), complied. But the chieftains of some hilly clans including the,
Aspasios and Assakenois sections of the Kambojas (classical names), known in
Indian texts as Ashvayanas and Ashvakayanas (names referring to the equestrian
nature of their society from the Sanskrit root work Ashva meaning horse), refused
to submit.
Alexander personally took command of the shield-bearing guards, footcompanions, archers, Agrianians and horse-javelin-men and led them against the
Kamboja clans—the Aspasios of Kunar/Alishang valleys, the Guraeans of the
Guraeus (Panjkora) valley, and the Assakenois of the Swat and Buner valleys.
5
Megasthenes (350 BCE ?)
Partly adapted from Antiquity and Continuity of Indian History by Prasad Gokhale
(excerpt)
Megasthenes wrote extensively on India in a book titled Indika, during his travels
to the Indian subcontinent. Unfortunately none of his original manuscripts survive
today. Megasthenes book titled Indica is lost and nobody in the modern world
has been able to retrieve the book or its contents. So all we have is the account of
Arrian and Strabo who claim to quote him. Megasthenes purportedly lived at the
court of King Sandrocottus, for some years after 302 BCE (approximately 20 years
after the much ballyhooed invasion of Alexander) as the ambassador of Seleucus
Nicator who proclaimed himself the emperor of the eastern dominions of
Alexander after his death.
But we forget that there was more than one Chandragupta in Indian History. There
is also the first of the Imperial Gupta dynasty Chandragupta I. Modern historians
place him 600 years after Sandrocottus (of the Mauryas). Note this is only a
relative dating and not an absolute one. The reason they gave was that this would
place Asoka Vardhana (Chandragupta’s grandson) around the middle of the third
century. Of course this does not explain why it is so sacrosanct to place Asoka in
the middle of the third century BCE. But assuming the answer as an assumption
was probably equally in vogue then, long before we had coined the phrase
‘circular argument’. Other scholars such as M Troyer, Kuppiah, Narayana Sastry
objected to this identification with Chandragupta Maurya and they pointed out that
Chndragupta of the Gupta empire should be identified with Sandrocottus. Troyer
communicated this view to Max Mueller but M Mueller did not even bother to
reply.
However, the Greek chronicles are strangely silent on the names of Chanakya
(Chandragupta's Guru) who managed to install the Maurya on the Magadha
throne, Bindusar (his son) and even Ashoka (his grandson) whose empire25
extended far wider than that of Chandragupta. The empire of Chandragupta,
also known as the Magadha empire, was very powerful and had a long history
but is nowhere mentioned by the Greeks. Even Buddha bhikkus and the
flourishing religion of the Buddha are not mentioned in their literature. This
imbroglio has been challenged by various scholars and is precisely
summarized by K. Rajaram (in "A Peep into the Past History, Seminar Papers",
Madras, 1982), "There are difficulties in calculating the date of the coronation of
Asoka .. In the first instance, the very identification of Sandrokotus with
Chandragupta Maurya is questioned. In the second one, the date of the death of
6
26
Menander,
Buddhist
The
greek
7
Euclid (approximately
323 BCE - 283 BCE)
We are not sure about the extent to which Euclid traveled in the East or had studied Indian
methods in Geometry, but that there was considerable commerce and travel there is no doubt
since this is the time shortly after the formation of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires.We do not
have any records of Indians travelling to Greece but there is some evidence of Greeks travelling
east. So it does make sense to study the Greek methods such as the Elements of Euclid versus the
geometry of the more ancient Sulva sutras which are dated much earlier by several
centuries.Again Indics are the most qualified to make this comparison , since the study of Euclids
elements is part of the school curriculum, whereas many in the west and this includes scholars in
have only a nodding acquaintanace with the names of Baudhayana or Apastambha.
While many ancient individuals, known and unknown, contributed to the subject, none equaled the
impact of Euclid and his Elements of geometry, a book now 2,300 years old and the object of as
much painful and painstaking study as the Bible. Much less is known about Euclid, however, than
about Moses. In fact, the only thing known with a fair degree of confidence is that Euclid taught at
the Library of Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–285/83 BC). Euclid wrote not only on
geometry but also on astronomy and optics and perhaps also on mechanics and music. Only the
Elements, which was extensively copied and translated, has survived intact.
Euclid's Elements was so complete and clearly written that it literally obliterated the work of his
predecessors. What is known about Greek geometry before him comes primarily from bits quoted by
Plato and Aristotle and by later mathematicians and commentators. Among other precious items
they preserved are some results and the general approach of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 BC) and his
followers. The Pythagoreans convinced themselves that all things are, or owe their relationships to,
numbers. The doctrine gave mathematics supreme importance in the investigation and
understanding of the world. Plato developed a similar view, and philosophers influenced by
Pythagoras or Plato often wrote ecstatically about geometry as the key to the interpretation of the
universe. Thus ancient geometry gained an association with the sublime to complement its earthy
origins and its reputation as the exemplar of precise reasoning.
27
8
q
u
o
Apollonius of Tyana
Apollonius of Tyana
(ca. 1, Tyana - ca. 97 AD, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ephesus) was a Greek NeoPythagorean
philosopher
and teacher
Engraved portrait of Apollonius of Tyana. The Nazarene, by Raphael. N.M. Starr,
Medium.
Apollonius of Tyana (ca. 1, Tyana - ca. 97 AD, Ephesus) was a Greek NeoPythagorean philosopher and teacher. His teaching influenced both scientific
thought and occultism for centuries after his death.
James Francis prefaced a discussion of elements of fiction and reality that
confront one another in Philostratus' vita of Apollonius, "The most that can be
said further both with certainty and without fear of 'contamination' from
posthumous representations is that Apollonius appears to have been a wandering
ascetic/philosopher/wonderworker of a type common to the eastern part of the
early empire." Apollonius is virtually only known through the medium of
Philostratus, whose biography's peripatetic narrative structure is built upon a
series of instructive dialogues and the sage's responses to places and events (see
Life of Apollonius of Tyana). Apollonius was a vegetarian, and a disciple of
Pythagoras. He is quoted as having said "For I discerned a certain sublimity in the
discipline of Pythagoras, and how a certain secret wisdom enabled him to know,
not only who he was himself, but also who he had been; and I saw that he
approached the altars in purity, and suffered not his belly to be polluted by
partaking of the flesh of animals; and that he kept his body pure of all garments
woven of dead animal refuse; and that he was the first of mankind to restrain his
tongue, inventing a discipline of silence described in the proverbial phrase, "An ox
sits upon it." I also saw that his philosophical system was in other respects
oracular and true. So I ran to embrace his teachings..."
28
This is The Prayer of Apollonius of Tyana, circa 23: "Oh, Thou Sun, send me as far
around the world as is my pleasure and thine; and may I make the acquaintance of
good men but never hear anything of bad ones, nor they of me."
What makes Apollonius intriguing from an Indic viewpoint is that he espouses
Indic values and is described by Philostratus as being a vegetarian. He is also
regarded as having won the respect of his fellow citizens as a person who had
been to India to partake of their wisdom. Much of the ancient world sent its best
and brightest minds to Indic universities such as the one in Takshasheela (Taxila),
9
Ptolemy
29
10
30
Huen Tsang (Xuan Zang)
11
I Tsing (635 CE
Buddhist pilgrim who has left behind an account of his travels to India. His name
may correctly be pronounced as Yijing, and is also written as I-ching. Born in 635
AD in Fan-Yang (modern Cho-Chou) near present-day Beijing, he began a secular
education at the age of seven. His teacher died when he was twelve; it was at this
time that he devoted himself to the study of the Buddhist Canon. In his fourteenth
year (AD 648) he was admitted to the Order.
After his ordination in 654, I-tsing spent five years in the study of the rules of
discipline (Vinayapitaka) which remained his main interest and formed the main
topic of his writing. The pilgrim was aware of FA-HIEN's travels and also of the
immediate example of HIUEN-TSANG, - he was in Changan when Hiuen-tsang's
funeral took place there in 664 AD - and was inspired by them to go to India.
I-tsing left for India from Canton by sea in 671, arriving in India in 673. After
visiting the sacred Buddhist sites in Magadha, he resided at the great Nalanda
monastery for ten years (676-685), devoting himself to the study of the Vinya. He
left India in 685 for the city of Shri Bhoja (or Sri Boja, known as Shri Vijaya, ie
Palembang in Sumatra), which at that time was very much under the cultural
influence of India. Here he devoted himself to the translation of Buddhist Sanskrit
texts.
In 689 I-tsing returned to China to obtain assistance for his translations. He then
returned to Sri Vijaya, and remained there for five more years, returning to China
in 695 during the reign of the well-known patron of Buddhism, the Empress Wu
Zetian. Thus, I-tsing's stay abroad roughly covers a period of twenty-five years
(671-695). He received much acclaim on his return, but like his predecessor Hiuentsang, I-tsing devoted the remaining years of his life to the translation of Buddhist
works. He died in 713 AD at the age of 79, during the reign of the Chinese Emperor
Zhongzong.
31
Apart from his translations, I-tsing has left behind two important works. The
Qiufa Gaoseng Zhuan (Ch' iu-fa Kao-seng Chuan) is a series of brief
biographies of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims he met or heard of while he was in
India. This work is interesting in that it gives an impression of the numbers of
pilgrims who went to India but have left no records of their own. His major work,
Nanhai Jigui Neifa Zhuan (Nan-hai Chi-kuei Nei-fa Chuan) meaning 'A Record of
the Buddhist Religion sent Home from the Southern Sea', is quite unique among
the records left by the Buddhist pilgrims. It is possible that because of the
12
13
32
14
15
33
16
17
34
18
35
19
Severus Sebokht
The first sign that the Indian numerals were moving west comes from a source
which predates the rise of the Arab nations. In 662 AD Severus Sebokht, a
Nestorian bishop who lived in Keneshra on the Euphrates river, wrote:-
662 CE
I will omit all discussion of the science of the Indians, ... , of their subtle
discoveries in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the
Greeks and the Babylonians, and of their valuable methods of calculation which
surpass description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of
nine signs. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived
at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced,
even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value.
This passage clearly indicates that knowledge of the Indian number system was
known in lands soon to become part of the Arab world as early as the seventh
century. The passage itself, of course, would certainly suggest that few people in
that part of the world knew anything of the system. Severus Sebokht as a Christian
bishop would have been interested in calculating the date of Easter (a problem to
Christian churches for many hundreds of years). This may have encouraged him
to find out about the astronomy works of the Indians and in these, of course, he
would find the arithmetic of the nine symbols.
36
20
Abu Abdulla Muhammad Abu Abdulla Muhammad Ibrahim-al-Fazari in 772-773 A.D. translated Sidhanta
Ibrahim-al-Fazari in 772-773 from Sanskrit into Arabic, which, according to G. Sarton provided "possibly the
CE
vehicle by means of which the Hindu numerals were transmitted from India to
Islam".
37
Muhammad Ben Musa aIPortrait on wood made in 1983 from a Persian illuminated manuscript for the
Khuwarizmi (circa
l200th anniversary of his birth. Museum of the Ulugh Begh Observatory.
Urgentsch (Kharezm). Uzbekistan (ex USSR). By calling one of its fundamental
783 -850 ).
practices and theoretical activities the algorithm computer science
commemorates this great Muslim scholar. Made a detailed study of Hindu
mathematics and Astronomy. A manuscript copy of this work dated 743 A H (or
1342 CE) is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and it is surmised to be
the earliest copy in existence. An English translation from the Arabic was made
by Fredric Rosen and published in 1931
The following is a quote from “Asian contributions to Mathematics by Romesh
Gangolli
http://www.pps.k12.or.us/depts-c/mc-me/be-as-ma.pdf
“The first book on algebra known to us is the book by the Persian mathematician
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (9th century CE.). It survives to us today only
in
Latin versions translated from the Arabic original. The title of the original book in
Arabic was Hisab al-jabr wa-al-muqabala. The word algebra in fact is derived from
the word aljabr in that title. Hisab means calculation. By al-jabr, which has been
translated as "completion or restoration," al-Khwarizmi meant the process in
which the same term is added to both sides of an equation in order to eliminate
negative terms. He used almuqabala, which has been translated as "reduction" or
"balancing,” to denote the process in which like terms on both sides of an
equation may be canceled. To illustrate, I use the words of van der Waerden, (p.
70):
Thus, the equation
50 + x 2 = 29 + 10 x
38
which occurs in Rosen's translation of al-Khwarizmi's Algebra on page 40, is
reduced by al-muqabala to
21 + x 2 = 10 x 21 + x 2 = 10 x
which in Rosen reads: “There remains twenty-one and a square, equal to ten
things.” 25
Thus, al-Khwarizmi was concerned in his book with the art of solving equations
by "completion, restoration, reduction and balancing.” The process by which one
can
21
22
4
Notes on the extent to See Brennand
which Arab mathemticiaqns
and astronomers borrowed
from india
Vigila (976 CE)
Written in 976 in the convent of Albelda (near the town of Logroño, in the north
of Spain ) by a monk named Vigila, the Coda Vigilanus contains the nine
numerals in question, but not zero. The scribe clearly indicates in the text that
the figures are of Indian origin:
Item de figuels aritmetice. Scire debemus Indos subtilissimum ingenium habere
et ceteras gentes eis in arithmetica et geometrica et ceteris liberalibu.c
disciplinis concedere. Et hoc manifèstum at in novem figuris, quibus quibus
designant unum quenque gradum cuiu.slibetgradus. Quatrum hec sunt forma:
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.
“The same applies to arithmetical figures. It should be noted that the Indians
have an extremely subtle intelligence, and when it comes to arithmetic,
geometry and other such advanced disciplines, other ideas must make way for
theirs. The best proof of this is the nine figures with which they represent each
number no matter how high. This is how the figures look:
39
23
Al Biruni Abu Rayhan
Muhammad ibn Ahmad alBiruni Persian: ‫ اﺑﻮرﻳﺤﺎن ﺑﻴﺮوﻧﯽ‬,
September
15,
973–
December 13, 1048)
In the 11th century, Islam came to India from Persia through the conquest by
Mahmud of Ghazni. Ghaznavi brought along a number of poets, artisans and
religious persons who settled down in India. But he also brought death and
destruction to the lands he conquered . Even AlBiruni says of his master that
everywhere Ghazni went the people scattered like the wind and that it was hard to
come across learned men because they fled from the prospect of certain death .
Like many a conqueror before and after him he specially targeted the Brahmanas
and sent huge numbers of Indians into slavery and exile to the slave markets of
Damascus , Isfahan and Samarkand. It was the advent of Islam that terminated
scholarship in th exact sciences in northern India after 1200 CE
Lahore (now in Pakistan) in the Punjab became an important centre of Persian
literature, art and mysticism. Between 1206 CE and 1687 CE Muslim dynasties
appeared in different parts of India. During this period, Turks, Tartars and some
Arabs who had imbibed Iranian influence came to India. During the rule of the
Khilji dynasty (14th century) several Persian scholars from Tabriz and Isfahan
Close to the banks of the visited the royal courts in India.
Ganges, in Patna, stands the
Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public
Library a unique repository of
about
21,000
Oriental
manuscripts and 2.5 lakh
printed books. It contains one
of the origiinal manuscripts o
40
During the 11th century CE, Al-Biruni, believed to be a Shia Muslim of Iranian
origin born in Khwarizm in northern Iran, visited India during the Ghaznavi period.
Actually al Biruni spoke Dari as his native tongue, which suggests he lived and
grew up in present day Afghanistan where Dari is one of the dialects of Farsi that
is widely spoken even today, and by that token can hardly be termed as somebody
unfamiliar with Indic traditions even before he came to India
He wrote his famous Kitab-ul-Hind in Persian, which involved a detailed study of
Indian customs, traditions and the Indian way of life. Earlier, many Indian works on
astronomy, mathematics and medicine had been translated into Arabic during the
early Abbasid period, and Al-Biruni, who was also very interested in astronomy
and mathematics, refers to some of these texts. Biruni was a prolific writer, and
besides his mother tongue, Dari(an Iranian dialect), Persian and Arabic, he also
knew Hebrew, Syriac and Sanskrit.[44] He studied Sanskrit manuscripts to check
earlier Arabic writings on India. Al Biruni composed about 20 books on India –
both originals and translations, and a great number of legends based on the
folklore of ancient Persia and India. He developed a special interest in the
Samkhya Yoga traditions of Indian philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita. He was
possibly the first foreign scholar to have seriously studied the Puranas, specially
the Vishnu Purana.[45] Biruni also rendered the al-Magest of Ptolemy and Geometry
of Euclid into Sanskrit.[46]
However, AlBiruni, for all his scholarship is prey to the prejudices of his co-religionists and as we have mentioned in the
24
Saad al Andalusi (1068)
25
William
of
(1125 CE)
26
Adelard of Bath (1130 CE)
Saad al-Andalusi, the first historian of Science who in 1068 wrote Kitab Tabaqut alUmam in Arabic(Book of Categories of Nations) Translated into English by Alok
Kumar in 1992To their credit, the Indians have made great strides in the study of
numbers (3) and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and
reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy)
and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other mathematical studies.
After all that, they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of
medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of
compounds and the peculiarities of substances.
Malmesbury C. 1125, The Benedictine chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote De gestis
regum Anglorum, in which he related that the Arabs adopted the Indian figures
and transported them to the countries they conquered, particularly Spain . He
goes on to explain that the monk Gerbert of Aurillac, who was to become Pope
Sylvester II (who died in 1003) and who was immortalized for restoring sciences
in Europe, studied in either Seville or Cordoba, where he learned about Indian
figures and their uses and later contributed to their circulation in the Christian
countries of the West. L Malmesbury (1596), 36 ; Woepcke (1857), p. 35J
C. 1130, Adelard of Bath wrote a work entitled: Algoritmi de numero Indorum
(“Algoritmi: of Indian figures”), which is simply a translation of an Arabic tract
about Indian calculation. [Boncompagni (1857), vol. Ii (not to be mistaken for
Peter
Abelard of Abelard andHeloise fame).. was responsible for
introducing Indian numerals in Europe…..
41
27
Bishop Raymond of Toledo C. 1140, Bishop Raymond of Toledo gave his patronage to a work written by the
(1140 CE)
converted Jew Juan de Luna and archdeacon Domingo Gondisalvo: the Liber
Algorismi de numero Indorum (“Book of Algorismi of Indian figures) which is
simply a translation into a Spanish and Latin version of an Arabic tract on
Indian arithmetic. [Boncompagni (1857), vol. 11
28
Robert of Chester (1143 CE)
42
C. 1143, Robert of Chester wrote a work entitled: Algoritmi de numero Indorum
(“Algoritmi: Indian figures”), which is simply a translation of an Arabic work
about Indian arithmetic. [Karpinski (1915); Wallis (1685). p. 121
29
Rabbi Abraham Ben MeIr C. 1150, Rabbi Abraham Ben MeIr Ben Ezra (1092—1167), after a long voyage to
Ben Ezra (1092—1167)
the East and a period spent in Italy , wrote a work in Hebrew entitled: Sefer ha
mispar (“Number Book”), where he explains the basic rules of written
calculation.
He uses the first nine letters of the Hebrew alphabet to represent the nine units.
He represents zero by a little circle and gives it the Hebrew name of galgal
(“wheel”), or, more frequently, sfra (“void”) from the corresponding Arabic
word.
However, all he did was adapt the Indian system to the first nine Hebrew letters
(which he naturally had used since his childhood).
In the introduction, he provides some graphic variations of the figures, making
it clear that they are of Indian origin, after having explained the place-value
system: “That is how the learned men of India were able to represent any
number using nine shapes which they fashioned themselves specifically to
symbolize the nine units.” (Silberberg (1895), p.2: Smith and Ginsburg (1918):
Steinschneider (1893)1
43
30
John of Seville (1150 CE)
Around the same time, John of Seville began his Liberalgoarismi de practica
arismetrice (“Book of Algoarismi on practical arithmetic”) with the following:
Numerus est unitatum cot/echo, quae qua in infinitum progredilur (multitudo
enim crescit in infinitum), ideo a peritissimis Indis sub quibusdam regulis et
certis lirnitibus infinita numerositas coarcatur, Ut de infinitis dfinita disciplina
traderetur etfuga subtilium rerum sub alicuius artis certissima Jege ten eretur:
“A number is a collection of units, and because the collection is infinite (for
multiplication can continue indefinitely), the Indians ingeniously enclosed this
infinite multiplicity within certain rules and limits so that infinity could be
scientifically defined: these strict rules enabled them to pin down this subtle
concept.
[B. N., Paris, Ms. lat. 16 202, p 51: Boncompagni (1857), vol. I, p. 261
44
31
Leonardo of Pisa (1202)
Fibonacci
“In 1202, Leonard of Pisa (known as Fibonacci), after voyages that took him to the
Near East and Northern Africa, and in particular to Bejaia (now in Algeria), wrote a
tract on arithmetic entitled Liber Abaci (“a tract about the abacus”), in which he
explains
the
following:
Cum genitor meus a patria publicus scriba in duana bugee pro pisanis
mercatoribus ad earn confluentibus preesset, me in pueritia mea ad se uenire
faciens, inspecta utilitate el cornmoditate fiutura, ibi me studio abaci per aliquot
dies stare uoluit et doceri. Vbi a mirabii magisterio in arte per nouem figuras
Indorum introductus. . . Novem figurae Indorum hae sun!: cum his itaque
novemfiguris. et turn hoc signo o. Quod arabice zephirum appellatur, scribitur qui
libel numerus: “My father was a public scribe of Bejaia, where he worked for his
country in Customs, defending the interests of Pisan merchants who made their
fortune there. He made me learn how to use the abacus when I was still a child
because he saw how I would benefit from this in later life. In this way I learned the
art of counting using the nine Indian figures... The nine Indian figures are as
follows:
987654321 “
Quoted from Georges Ifrah The Universal History of Numbers. The Arabs were
instrumental in transmitting this knowledge to Europe.
45
32
Alexandre
(1240 CE)
de
Ville
Dieu Around 1240, Alexandre de Ville-Dieu composed a manual in verse on written
calculation (algorism). Its title was Carmen de Algorismo, and it began with the
following two lines: Haec algorismus ars praesens dicitur, in qua Talibus
Indorumfruimur bis quinquefiguris
“Algorism is the art by which at present we use those Indian figures, which
number two times five”. [Smith and Karpinski (1911), p. 11]
46
33
Maximus
1310 CE)
Planudes
(1260- Around the year 1252, Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes (1260—1310)
composed a work entitled Logistike Indike (“Indian Arithmetic”) in Greek, or
even Psephophoria kata Indos (“The Indian way of counting”), where he
explains the following: “There are only nine figures. These are:
123456789
[figures given in their Eastern Arabic form]
A sign known as tziphra can be added to these, which, according to the Indians,
means ‘nothing’. The nine figures themselves are Indian, and tziphra is written
thus: 0”. [B. N., Pans. Ancien Fonds grec, Ms 2428, f” 186 r”]
It Is not surprising that the initial impulse to study the Indian number system
came from Arabs, Byzantines and the Arab Maghreb in Spain rather than from
Rome
http://mathdl.maa.org/convergence/1/?nodeId=1293&pa=content&sa=viewDocument
by Peter G Brown
Maximus Planudes was born around 1255 in Nicomedia and died at
Constantinople around 1305. He took the name Maximus, replacing his baptismal
name of Manuel, when he became a monk, shortly before 1280. Apart from
translating theological and classical works from Latin into Greek - a good
knowledge of Latin seems to have been a rarity among the Byzantines - he is best
known for his editions and commentaries on Greek poetry and drama, as well as
for his training of upcoming scholars, such as Manuel Moschopoulos, who
continued the important work of preserving, and ensuring the survival of a
47
number of important Greek works.
As with Moschopoulos, who wrote a work on Magic Squares, Planudes had an
interest
in
Mathematics,
evidenced
by
his
editions
of
Aratos'
Phainomena, Theodosios ' Sphairica, Euclid's Elements, (Ps-)Iamblichos'
Theologoumena
Arithmeticae
and Diophantos
'
Arithmetica.
The present work, The Great Calculation According to the Indians, introduces (i)
the (eastern) Arabic form of the Indian numerals, as used in Persia, along with (ii)
a detailed exposition of algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication and
division, both in the decimal system of these numerals and also in the
sexagesimal system (iii), whose applications lie in astronomy. Finally, he gives
algorithms for the extraction of square roots (iv), to various degrees of accuracy.
The introduction of this numeral system to Europe cannot be traced down to any
one person or event, but seems to have occured in various places independently
and over a period of time. The earliest known European manuscript containing the
first nine Hindu-Arabic numerals dates from 976 and was found in a monastery in
northern Spain. Later, Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, after a residency in Toledo in
the early twelfth century brought some form of the numeral system, (probably the
western Arabic variety), to England sometime between 1140 and 1167, replacing
the Arabic symbols with Hebrew letters, but maintaining the decimal structure.
Other figures such as Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 945-1003) and John of Hallifax
(Sacrobosco)(c. 1195-56) in France also played their part in the disemination of
the
new
system.
Planudes may have acquired his knowledge of the numeral system and algorithms
48
during his time in Venice, where he was stationed as Ambassador during the reign
of the Byzantine Emperor Andronicos II. Venice was at that time, of course, a
major trading city and a vital point of contact between the East and West.
49
34
Meister Eckhart (1260 CE)
From the book Meister Eckhart, Paulist Press, NY, 1981, ISBN 0 8091 0322 2.
“I was struck by Eckharts remarks on detachment Middle high German
Abegeschedenheit), which show remarkable resemblance to those in the Gita,
page 47“True detachment is nothing else than for the spirit to stand as immovable
against whatever may chance to it of joy and sorrow, shame and disgrace, as a
mountain of lead stands before a little breath of wind. Thus immovable
detachment brings a man into the greatest equality with God, because God has it
from his immovable detachment that he is God, and it is from his detachment that
he has his purity and his simplicity and his unchangeability”
35
Petrus of Dada (1291)
It is not clear, at this point in my studies of Eckhart, as I am still in the process of
discovery as to his prior knowledge of Vedanta, and whether this is an a posteriori
belief, but clearly this is an extraordinarily prescient observation invoking one of
the essential tenets of Vedanta, namely Vairagya
Petrus of Dada (1291) wrote a commentary on a work entitled Algorismus by
Sacrobosco (John of Halifax, c. 1240), in which he says the following (which
contains a mathematical error): Non enim omnis numerus per quascumquefiguras
Indorum repraesentatur “Not every number can be represented in Indian figures”.
[Curtze (1.897), p. 25
36
37
50
Pope Honorius IV (1312)
The Holy Father encouraged the learning of oriental languages in order to preach
Christianity amongst the pagans. Soon after this in 1312, the Ecumenical Council
of the Vatican decided that-“The Holy Church should have an abundant number of
Catholics well versed in the languages, especially in those of the infidels, so as to
be able to instruct them in the sacred doctrine.” The result of this was the creation
of the chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean at the Universities of Bologna,
Oxford, Paris and Salamanca. A century later in 1434, the General Council of Basel
returned to this theme and decreed that –“All Bishops must sometimes each year
send men well-grounded in the divine word to those parts where Jews and other
infidels live, to preach and explain the truth of the Catholic faith in such a way that
the infidels who hear them may come to recognize their errors. Let them compel
them to hear their preaching.” 1. Centuries later in 1870, during the First Vatican
Council, Hinduism was condemned in the “five anathemas against pantheism”
according to the Jesuit priest John Hardon in the Church-authorized book, The
Catholic Catechism. However, interests in Indology only took shape and concrete
direction after the British came to India, with the advent of the discovery of
Sanskrit by Sir William Jones in the 1770’s. Other names for Indology are Indic
studies or Indian studies or South Asian studies. Political motivations have been
always dominant in the pursuit of Indological studies right from the outset since
the time of Sir William Jones, when he discovered the existence of Sanskrit.
38
39
In fact the British presence in India was steadily increasing long before the Battle
of Plassey in 1757 CE, but so great was the insularity of the colonial overlord that
it took almost almost three hundred years for a scholar like Sir William to show up
in India after Vasco da Gama landed of the coast of Goa in 1492 CE, and notice the
similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages
The Crafte of Nombrynge The Crafte of Nombrynge (c. 1350), the oldest known English arithmetical tract: II
(1350 CE)
fforthermore ye most vndirstonde that in this craft ben vsed teen figurys, as here
bene writen for esampul 098 ^ 654321... in the quych we vse teen figwys of Inde.
Questio II why Zen figurys of Inde? Soiucio. For as I have sayd afore thei were
fonde frrst in Inde. [D. E. Smith (1909)
One of the first Europeans to realize the similarity between Sanskrit and the
St.Francis Xavier
European Languages. This hardly dampened his ardor to institute one of the
most savage inquisitions in the history of the church against the native
(1506 CE – 1552 CE )
populations of the Portuguese Indian dominions such as Goa. His task along
with others who followed him was both to gather intelligence and knowledge
51
while at the same time converting people to the Catholic faith at a very high
rate.
The following is a European account , which is clearly one sided
XAVIER, FRANCIS (1506–1552), cofounder of the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus
(the Jesuits), missionary, and saint. Francisco de Jassu y Xavier was born in the
family castle in the kingdom of Navarre (now northern Spain), the fifth and youngest
child of noble, wealthy, and pious Catholic parents. His early education took place at
home and under the tutelage of local priests. In 1525 the keen, ambitious student left
home permanently, bound for Paris. A handsome, slender, athletic youth, about five
feet four inches tall, he was noted then, as throughout his life, for his cheerful and
vivacious personality. At the University of Paris, Xavier gained a master of arts degree
in philosophy in 1530, taught this subject for several years (1530–1534), and then
studied theology until 1536.
During his years at the university, Ignatius Loyola, a fellow student since 1528,
became an increasingly important influence on Xavier, and by 1533 Xavier had
become one of his disciples. In 1534 Xavier made the Spiritual Exercises under the
direction of Ignatius and on August 15 he joined Ignatius and five other students in a
chapel in Montmartre, a district of Paris, where all of them vowed to lead lives of
apostolic poverty, to labor for the salvation of their neighbors, to make a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, and to place their services at the disposition of the pope. Together with
three other students who joined the group when it renewed its vows a year later, these
men were the ten founders of the Society of Jesus.
Beginning the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Xavier left Paris in November 1536 with eight
of his companions and, traveling by foot, reached Venice nearly two months later.
52
Ignatius met them there. In Venice, Xavier, along with Ignatius and four other
companions, was ordained a priest in June 1537. War with the Turks ruled out a
voyage across the Mediterranean to Palestine, so in 1538 Xavier went to Rome and
there shared in the discussions that led to the founding of the Society of Jesus. Until
his departure from Rome in 1540, he served as secretary of the new religious order.
When the pious King John III of Portugal put out a call for missionaries, especially for
the care of recently converted Paravas (Bhavatas) in southern India, Xavier left Rome
for Portugal, traveling overland to Lisbon in the entourage of the Portuguese
ambassador. While awaiting the annual departure of the India fleet, Xavier performed
various priestly tasks in the city and at the royal court. His ship set sail in April 1541,
rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and wintered in Mozambique, where Xavier's two
Jesuit colleagues remained. After further stops at Melinde (Malindi, in modern-day
Kenya) and the island of Socotra (off the coast of modern-day Somalia, where Xavier
had to be dissuaded from remaining), the voyage ended in May 1542 in Goa, a district
on the west coast of India and the main Portuguese center in that country.
Until the end of the rainy season in September, Xavier ministered to the Portuguese
and native Christians in Goa. Accompanied by three native helpers, he then sailed to
the southern tip of the continent. For the next three years his apostolate was centered
in Malabar and Travancore, the coastal regions northwest of Cape Comorin; in the
regions northeast of the cape as far as São Thomé (modern-day Madras); and on the
neighboring island of Ceylon. Much of his ministry consisted of instructing the
thousands of Parava pearl divers and fishermen who had been converted to Roman
Catholicism around 1535 but whose religious knowledge remained minimal.
Spectacular numbers of conversions were made: Xavier reported baptizing over ten
thousand villagers in Travancore in one month.
In September 1545 Xavier sailed from São Thomé to Malacca, a Portuguese settlement
on the Malay Peninsula; then to the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, in the East Indies,
53
where his main concern was the native Christians, left without clergy in the
Portuguese centers of Amboina and Ternate; and then as far north as the Moro
Islands. He returned to Malacca in June 1547 and to Goa in March 1548. After further
work along the Fishery Coast he returned to Goa once again. In April 1549 he set sail
with three Japanese converts and two fellow Jesuits to inaugurate the Christian
mission in Japan. When he departed from Japan for Goa twenty-seven months later,
he left behind some two thousand converts. Hoping to initiate a Christian mission to
China, he took ship from Goa in April 1552, but he was not allowed to disembark on
the Chinese mainland. After three months of fruitless waiting on the desolate island of
Sancian (near Canton), he died on December 3 following a brief illness. His incorrupt
body was taken in 1554 to Goa, where it is still enshrined and greatly venerated.
Xavier is ranked by the Europeans who overlooked his murderous propensities during
the inquisition among the greatest missionaries in Christian history. His numerous
far-ranging journeys were not those of a spiritual adventurer, restlessly seeking new
fields to conquer. He served not only as missionary but also as apostolic nuncio and
Jesuit superior, with the duty of investigating mission possibilities in areas then little
known to Europeans. He was both a pioneer and organizer of the Jesuit missions in
the Far East, intent on obtaining suitably trained European co-workers. He was eager
to supply mission stations with churches, schools, and personnel and to be kept
informed about them. In 1622 he was canonized, and in 1927 he was designated by
Pius XI as patron of all missions. His annual liturgical feast is celebrated on December
3.
See Also
Jesuits.
Bibliography
54
The critical edition of the letters and other writings of
40
Matteo (Matthew
1552 – 1610 )6
)
Ricci Mateo Riccii an Italian Jesuit Missionary who with Michael Ruggieri opened the
door to China for evangelization but more importantly from the perspective of
determining the means by which knowledge was transmitted to Europe, acted as
the transmitter of such knowledge from the east to the West. Born in Macarena on
October 6, 1552. Went on to study law at Rome. Where in 1572 he joined the
society of Jesus (SJ)…. He studied mathematics and geography under Clavius at
the Roman college between 1572 and 1576 and in 1577 left for the indies via
Lisbon. He arrived in Goa in 1578 where he taught at the college until 1582 and
went on to China to establish the Catholic church there. But it is the 4 years he
spent in Goa and Malabar that interests us.
The Portuguese if we recall had a large presence in Cochin (until the protestant
Dutch closed down the Cochin College in 1670. So Ricci was sent to Cochin and
remained in touch with the Dean of the Collegio Romano. He explicitly
acknowledges that he was trying to learn the intricacies of the Indian calendrical
systems from Brahmanas. ( See for instance , Ricci (1609) 7
The Aryabhata Group at the University of Exeter in the UK “Transmission of the Calculus from Kerala to Europe”, published in
Proceedings of thje International symposium and Colloquium on the 1500th Anniversary of the Aryabhatiyum, Kerala Sastra Sahitya
Parishat,2002.
7
Ricci (1609) 7et les remaniements de sa traduction latine (1615)’, in: Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres. Comptes
rendus des séances de l'année 2003, janvier-mars, 2003, 61-84.
6
55
The task of preparing the Panchangas (literally the five parts) which were more
than a calendar and should properly be referred to as a almanac, was the
provenance of the Jyotishi pundit who was well versed in the Calendrical
algorithms to devise the proper almanac for his community. Each community (for
example farmers) had differing needs for their almanac and hence the need for a
Jyotishi Pundit. Today this is done with Calendrical software with the help of the
ephemeris published by the Government of India annually. The standard treatises
used then were the Laghu Bhaskariya and in Kerala the Karanapadhati.
So, it is clear that Matthew Ricci was trying too contact the appropriate
Brahmanas, as he explicitly stated that he was trying to do, and it appears unlikely
that he did not succeed in imbibing these techniques from them.
56
This is a case where we do not have documentary (as of this date, but with every
indication that we will find such evidence, evidence of the transmission of
knowledge, but where there exists motive, opportunity and circumstantial
evidence. Because of the more exacting standards applied to India, the
Occidentalists will not concede that such knowledge must have been transmitted
to the west.
41
The Society of Jesus (SJ)
However as a result of the double standard, this was enough in most instances for
western historians and philologists to dub India as a region from which nothing
worthwhile ever emanated. Which, but
The Society of Jesus was the elite corps of the intellectual army of the Vatican.
They served as the top rank of the evangelizing educators as well as the
57
Founded August 15, 1535, intelligence arm of the Vatican that gathered knowledge from foreign lands to be
by St.Francis Xavier
absorbed into the church run schools in Europe... Such an activity was by no
means illegal(although intelligence gathering about sensitive matters such as the
miliary would be considered illegall in most countries today/. The resulting benefit
to the west was rarely acknowledged by western historians of science who are
loathe to admit that Europe had borrowed anything from Asia .Mateo Ricci was
part of a small army created by the Vatican just for this purpose. Here is an
example of a “intelligence briefing done for the benefit of the Vatican hierarchy.
There are interesting anecdotes about Roberto de Nobili, who passed himself of as
a Brahmana.
The Jesuits clearly had more than a passing interest in India. During this period ,
the emperor Akbar, invited some Jesuits to his court as part of his attemot to
create a Din I Ilahi or a Universal faith. The portuguese interpreted this to mean
that he was amenable to conversion to Catholicism. At about the same time mateo
Ricci was sending back valuable information regarding the Mughal army.
At that time the Jesuits had more than a fleeting interest in the development of
calendrical systems. Ricci’s teacher Christof Clavius, was busy heading the
commission that uiltimately reformed the Gregorian calendar in 1582, an event that
had been preceeded by centuries of controversy.. In 1535 the council of trent had
already authorized the Pope to make the requisite correctons to the Julian
calendar (effective since the time of Julius Ceaser). This was a time also that the
Europeans realized that there were major errors in their conception of the diameter
of the earth. The concept of the sidereal day/month/year, a measurement with
respect to the the distant stars, was unknown to Europe at that time. All these
considerations led them to send men like Mateo Ricci to adopt the knowledge of
the Indics into their calendrical and navigation systems. The 2 instruments that
they borrowed from india were the armillary sphere and the Gnomon. Christof
58
Clavius had written a commentary on the Sphere and it is clear that the Vatican
had come to know that Asryabhta had an entire chapter devoted to the Gola
(Armillary sphere) and Vateshwear had a whole book on it.
It is ironical that today the west makes much of intellectual property rights. In the
sixteenth century they exhibited none of the delicacy they now show for other
peoples intellectual property. They simply stole the technology and more
importantly failed to acknowlege the source in later centuries. One of he major
conduits in this procfes were the Jesuits . ideally stuated as they were as teachers
in the new colleges they instituted in india and to camouflage their hidden agenda
as they evangelized the Indic population
42
Willchius (1540 CE)
43
Fr. Thomas Stephens
44
Willichius (1540) talks of Zyphrae! Nice, “Indian figures”. [Smith and Karpinski
(1911) p. 3]
According to Rajesh Kochhar one of the first Englishmen to set foot in India .
wrote the first Konkani grammar
Roberto
Di
Nobili(1577- posed as a Brahmana ,posited a counterfeit Veda, called the Romaka Veda. He
tried mightily to convince the Brahmanas of the superiority of the Christian faith,
1656),Jesuit Priest,
going so far as to wearing traditional Brahmana garb, but to no avail. He like Abbe
Dubois returned dispirited that it was indeed a difficult task. Some interesting
anecdotes from his life. In India a beginning had been made by Xavier. Before his
coming, the Portuguese had tried to impose Christianity on the natives with no
attempt to understand their customs and sensibilities. Christianity had come to be
identified in the minds of the Indian population with foreign conquest. Xavier had
59
tried to change all this, but it persisted even after his death.
The Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577 1656) observed and condemned this deplorable
state of affairs. He was a Roman aristocrat, a grandnephew of Pope Julius III. Sent
out to India in 1606, he followed the methods of Ricci, learning native languages,
adopting native ways of life, and condoning the continuance of time-honored
practices when he felt they were not irreconcilable with Christianity. Though there
was some opposition within the church to his methods because of what appeared
to be concessions to idolatry, he was able to gain the approval of Pope Gregory
XV in 1623 and continue his work. The european account of De Nobili, who it is
clear from this paasage had high connections in the Vatican having a close
relationship with a Pope himself
“This situation radically changed with the arrival of a young Italian Jesuit,
Roberto Nobili who, in Fernandes Trancoso's opinion, turned the mission upside
down. Nobili pretended, wrote Fernandes Trancoso in 1610, that "there are some
or
even big difference between us in religion".8 Moreover, the Italian denied that he
was
a "Portuguese", he donned heathen dress of a sannyasi, ate vegetarian food
cooked by
Brahman cooks, conversed only with Brahmans and high castes and dissociated
himself completely from the Catholic Parava church and its priest. The separation
60
of
churches which for the Portuguese missionary veteran amounted to schism was
finally
what prompted him to denounce his young coreligionist to the superiors in Cochin
and
Goa. It was to his surprise that he discovered that Nobili had powerful support in
his
Italian superiors, such as Alberto Laerzio, and that accommodatio was the
hallmark
of this particular missionary approach already in practice in China. After furious
exchanges between the two missionary camps that went on in Madurai and that
began
to involve Nobili's few high-cast converts and Fernandes Trancoso's Paravas, the
war
of treatises and letters began. Nobili's Latin texts, garnished with theological
quotations and analogies, started to circulate and be read and discussed among
the
Jesuit theologians in Cochin and Goa.
61
A response to Nobili's rhetorical propaganda for his experimental
accommodationist mission had to be concocted urgently from Fernandes
Trancoso's
side.9 Incidentally, these are the texts that ignited, a long controversy that
culminated
in the Malabar rites quarrel in the middle of the eighteenth century. The points of
disagreement between the two Jesuits were irreconcilable. While Nobili admiringly
recognized in Brahmans the learned men of European antiquity and tried to imitate
their life style, or as he would call it their "political customs" in order to gradually
weaned them over to Christianity, for Fernandes Trancoso, the Brahmans were
learned in diabolical sacrifices and mantras. The "ceremonies" and the "mode of
conduct" that he describes in detail in his treaties were geared to prove that the
Brahman way of life was their religion and he, in fact, gave it a name - the
Brahmanism (o bramanismo). By adding the suffix ism to an Indian word,
Fernandes
Trancoso made it into a concept that comes closer to the later notion of Hinduism
62
45
John Wallis (1616-1703)
46
Giovanni Dominique Cassini Published the results of his studies in Sanskrit in the Memoires de l’Academie
(1650 ?)
Royale des Sciences (the memoires originally appeared in Relation de Siam II
(1691-1699)The paper contained rules for calculating the mean motions of the sun
and the moon. He showed that Hindus have determined the length of the year to
be 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes and 56 seconds (365.258981481) based on
Aryabhata’s observations. The astronomical constants for the epoch starting on
Saturday March 2, 638 CE and other information that was specifically mentioned in
Indian sanskrit literature was also translated by him. Details of the calculation of
ahargana (typically used by Indian astronomers) were mentioned by him
Abraham Rogers (1651)
Translated some of the proverbs of Bhartrihari into Dutch providing Europe with
the first instance of Sanskrit literary works
François-Marie Arouet, also Francois Marie Arouet (pen name Voltaire) was born on November 21, 1694 in
known as Voltaire (1773)
Paris. Voltaire's intelligence, wit and style made him one of France's greatest
writers
and
philosophers.
47
48
John Walls (1616-1703) referred to the nine numerals as Indian figures [Wallis
(1695), p. 10]
Young Francois Marie received his education at "Louis-le-Grand," a Jesuit college
in Paris where he said he learned nothing but "Latin and the Stupidities." He left
school at 17 and soon made friends among the Parisian aristocrats. His humorous
verses made him a favorite in society circles. In 1717, his sharp wit got him into
trouble with the authorities. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven months
for writing a scathing satire of the French government. During his time in prison
Francois Marie wrote "Oedipe" which was to become his first theatrical success
and
adopted
his
pen
name
"Voltaire."
63
In 1726, Voltaire insulted the powerful young nobleman, "Chevalier De Rohan,"
and was given two options: imprisonment or exile. He chose exile and from 1726
to 1729 lived in England. While in England Voltaire was attracted to the philosophy
of John Locke and ideas of mathematician and scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. He
studied England's Constitutional Monarchy and its religious tolerance. Voltaire
was particularly interested in the philosophical rationalism of the time, and in the
study of the natural sciences. After returning to Paris he wrote a book praising
English customs and institutions. It was interpreted as criticism of the French
government and in 1734, Voltaire was forced to leave Paris again.
At the invitation of his highly-intelligent woman friend, "Marquise du Chatelet,"
Voltaire moved into her "Chateau de Cirey" near Luneville in eastern France. They
studied the natural sciences together for several years. In 1746, Voltaire was voted
1694 - 1778
into the "Academie Francaise." In 1749, after the death of "Marquise du Chatelet"
and at the invitation of the King of Prussia, "Frederick the Great," he moved to
Those who can make Potsdam (near Berlin in Germany). In 1753, Voltaire left Potsdam to return to
you believe absurdities France.
can make you commit
In 1759, Voltaire purchased an estate called "Ferney" near the French-Swiss
atrocities.
—Voltaire
border where he lived until just before of his death. Ferney soon became the
intellectual capital of Europe. Voltaire worked continuously throughout the years,
producing a constant flow of books, plays and other publications. He wrote
hundreds of letters to his circle of friends. He was always a voice of reason.
Voltaire was often an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution.
Towards the end of his life, Voltaire became an avowed enthusiast of the Indic
philosophic tradition.
64
If you are aware of books, movies, databases, web sites or other information
sources about Voltaire and his views on India, or if you would like to comment,
please send us email: [email protected].
« The "rediscovery" of India in the eighteenth century meant that India formed a
key part of Enlightenment discourse. Much of India's importance was indirect in
terms of constituting a challenge to the originality and greatest antiquity of
Europe's Greco-Roman inheritance. The challenge to Greco-Roman antiquity and
the superiority of Christianity was particularly embraced by the philosophes of the
eighteenth century who believed that the discovery of the ancient civilizations of
India and China would help in better understanding non-Western civilizations. The
presence of civilizations that predated the Greek and Roman proved that the
Western world was not the only developed society, nor the most advanced. The
philosophes thought it especially important to explore ancient Indian civilization to
discover how it had influenced and taught the Greek and Roman peoples. In this
sense, the exploration of Indian civilization was part of a concerted attempt at
what can be termed an emerging trend toward a global history of emphasizing the
linkages between cultures and civilizations rather than stressing the individual
achievements of societies. Jyoti Mohan, Univ of Maryland,
His primary work on India was Fragments sur quelques révolutions dans l'Inde
and sur le mort du Comte de Lalli, which he wrote as a sort of addendum to his
work on Annales de l'Empire.3 In addition, India appeared prominently in his
lectures on ancient and modern history and on philosophy, and also in his letters
to other luminaries of the French Enlightenment. Although he never traveled to
India, he expressed a keen desire to do so in a letter to Paul Gui de Chabonan in
1767.4 Voltaire also made frequent references to India in his many operas and
plays, many of which were set in an Indian context.
65
Fragments sur l'Inde consists of roughly two sections. One traces the history of
French activities in India until the loss of most of the French Indian territories
during the Seven Years War. It deals with the establishment, expansion, and
decline of French trade in India, from François Martin to Lally. The second part of
Fragments sur l'Inde is a compendium of all of Voltaire's thoughts and ideas on
India, which he put together from various articles, letters, and communications
regarding the discovery of Hinduism in India. Voltaire was also sufficiently
interested in India to include sections on Vedic religion, the Brahmans, and
Mughals in his complete works.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/16.2/mohan.html
"We have shown how much we surpass the Indians in courage and wickedness,
and how inferior to them we are in wisdom. Our European nations have mutually
destroyed themselves in this land where we only go in search of money, while the
first Greeks travelled to the same land only to instruct themselves." - Voltaire,
Fragments historiques sur l'Inde (first published Geneva, 1773), Oeuvres
Completes (Paris : Hachette, 1893), Vol.29, p.386
"I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the
Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc." - Voltaire, Lettres sur
l'origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l'Asie (first published Paris,
1777), letter of 15 December 1775.
"No sooner than India begin to be known to the Occident's barbarians than she
was the object of their greed, and even more so when these barbarians became
civilized and industrious, and created new needs for themselves.... The
Albuquerques and their successors succeeded in supplying Europe with pepper
and paintings only through carnage." - Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l'Inde,
66
op.cit., p.383
49
50
Fr. Francis J Pons (16981752)
Abraham
Hyacinthe
Anquetil-Duperron
(December
7,1731
to
January 17, 1805)
Astronomer, geographer and sanskrit scholar. The first Sanskrit grammar was
composed by him in 1734
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Du Perron (December 7, 1731–January 17, 1805),
French orientalist, brother of Louis-Pierre Anquetil, the historian, was born in
Paris. He stayed in India for seven years (1755-1761), where Parsi priests taught
him Persian, and translated the Avesta for him (it is probably not true that he
mastered the Avestan language). He edited a French translation of that Persian
translation in 1771, the first printed publication of Zoroastrian texts. He also
published a Latin translation of the Upanishads in 1804.
He was educated for the priesthood in Paris and Utrecht, but his taste for Hebrew,
Arabic, Persian, and other languages of the East caused him to change course to
devote himself entirely to them. His diligent attendance at the Royal Library
attracted the attention of the keeper of the manuscripts, the Abbé Sallier, whose
influence procured for him a small salary as a student of the Oriental languages.
He first lighted on some fragments of the Vendidad, a portion of the collection of
texts that make up the Avesta, and formed the project of a voyage to India to
discover the works of Zoroaster. With this end in view he enlisted as a private
soldier, on November 2, 1754, on the Indian expedition which was about to depart
from the port of L'Orient. His friends procured his discharge, and he was granted a
free passage, a seat at the captain's table, and a salary, the amount of which was
to be fixed by the governor of the French settlement in India.
67
After a passage of ten months, Anquetil landed, on August 10, 1755 at
Pondicherry. Here he remained a short time to master modern Persian, and then
hastened to Chandernagore to acquire Sanskrit. Just then war was declared
between France and England; Chandernagore was taken, and Anquetil returned to
Pondicherry overland. He found one of his brothers at Pondicherry, and embarked
with him for Surat; but, with a view of exploring the country, he landed at Mah and
proceeded on foot. At Surat he proceeded, by perseverance and address in his
discussions with Parsi theologians, in acquiring a sufficient knowledge of ancient
Persian (Avestan, which Anquetil-Duperron mistakenly called Zend) and middle
Persian languages to translate the portion of the Zoroastrian texts called the
Vendidad (or Vendidad Vide) and some other works.
Thence he proposed going to Benares, to study the language, antiquities, and
sacred laws of the Hindus; but the capture of Pondicherry obliged him to quit
India. Returning to Europe in an English vessel, he spent some time in London
and Oxford, and then set out for France. He arrived in Paris on March 14, 1762 in
possession of one hundred and eighty oriental manuscripts, besides other
curiosities.
The Abbé Jean Jacques Barthélemy procured for him a pension, with the
appointment of interpreter of oriental languages at the Royal Library. In 1763 he
was elected an associate of the Academy of Inscriptions, and began to arrange for
the publication of the materials he had collected during his eastern travels. In 1771
he published his Zend Avesta (3 vols.), containing collections from the sacred
writings of the Zoroastrians, a life of Zarathustra (Zoroaster), and fragments of
works ascribed to Zoroaster. In 1778 he published at Amsterdam his Legislation
orientale, in which he endeavoured to prove that the nature of oriental despotism
had been greatly misrepresented. His Recherches historiques et geographiques
sur L'Inde appeared in 1786, and formed part of Thieffenthaler's Geography of
68
India.
The Revolution seems to have greatly affected him. During that period he
abandoned society, and lived in voluntary poverty on a few pence a day. In 1798
he published L'Inde en rapport avec l'Europe (Hamburg, 2 vols.). From 1802 to
1804 he published a Latin translation (2 vols.) from the Persian of the Oupnek'hat
or Upanishada. It is a curious mixture of Latin, Greek, Persian, Arabic, and
Sanskrit.
Arthur Schopenhauer declared that his knowledge of Hindu philosophy, which
influenced Schopenhauer's own work to an enormous extent, was the result of
reading Anquetil-Duperron's translations.
See Biographie universelle; Sir William Jones, Works (vol. x, 1807); and the
Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society (vol. iii, 1856-1857). For a list of his
scattered writings see Quérard, La France littéraire.
References
•
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Retrieved
Duperron"
from
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Hyacinthe_Anquetil-
69
51
Warren Hastings (December Warren Hastings (December 6, 1732 - August 22, 1818) was the first governorgeneral of British India, from 1773 to 1785. He was famously impeached in 1787 for
6, 1732 - August 22, 1818)
corruption, and acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1814.
In many respects Warren Hastings epitomizes the strengths and shortcomings of
the British conquest and dominion over India. Unlike the Islamic invaders, who
did not even bother to learn an Indian language till they had been in the land for at
least half a dozen generations and whose approach to power was to strike terror in
the population by building pyramids of skulls of the 100,000 civilians they killed in
a single day, the British personified by such able and brilliant adminstrators such
as Warren Hastings went about consoilidating their power in a highly systematic
manner. They realized very early into their rule after they gained control over the
vast lands of the Gangetic plain with a handful of Britishi officers, that they would
have to rely on the Indic to administer these vast areas. In so doing, he makes a
virtue out of necessity by realizing the importance of various forms of knowledge
to the Colonial power, and in 1784 towards the end of his tenure as Governor
general, he makes the following remarks about the importance of various forms of
knowledge , including linguistic, legal and scientific for a colonial power and the
case that such knowledge could be put to use for the benefit of his country Britain
“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 usefiul to the state … It attracts and conciliates distant
affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in
subjection (notice there is no talk of removal of the chain, no pretence that they
will deal with the natives with dignity and respect) and it imprints on the hearts of
our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence … (now we know where
the expression ‘the white mans burden originated) …Every instance which brings
70
their real character (i.e. that of the Indians) 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 (would that more Englishman had heeded these words to a
greater extent than we the indics had experienced)… 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”i
Men like Warren hastings are rare in any society be it in England or in India. They
conbine the ability to work for a higher cause in this case the enrichment of
Britain while enriching themselves at the public expense. But Britain has never
been coy about honoring its buccaneers and bandits beginning with sir Francis
Drake and Robert Clive
Hastings was born at Churchill, Oxfordshire. He attended Westminster School
before joining the British East India Company in 1750 as a clerk. In 1757 he was
made the British Resident (administrative in charge) of Murshidabad. He was
appointed to the Calcutta council in 1761, but was back in England in 1764. He
returned to India in 1769 as a member of the Madras council and was made
governor of Bengal in 1772. In 1773, he was appointed the first Governor-General
of India.
After an eventful ten years tenure in which he greatly extended and regularised the
nascent Raj created by Clive of India, Hastings resigned in 1784. On his return to
England he was charged with high crimes and misdemeanours by Edmund Burke,
encouraged by Sir Philip Francis whom he had wounded in a duel in India. He was
impeached in 1787 but the trial, which began in 1788, ended with his acquittal in
1795. Hastings spent most of his fortune on his defence, although towards the end
71
of the trial the East India Company did provide financial support
52
Jean
Sylvain Jean-Sylvain Bailly) was a French astronomer and orator, one of the leaders of the
Bailly(September 15, 1736– early part of the French Revolution. He was ultimately guillotined during the Reign
of Terror.
November 12, 1793
Jean Sylvain Bailly.
Biography
Born at Paris, he was originally intended for the profession of a painter, but
preferred writing tragedies, until attracted to science by the influence of Nicolas de
Lacaille. He calculated an orbit for Halley's Comet when it appeared in 1759,
reduced Lacaille's observations of 515 zodiacal stars, and was, in 1763, elected a
member of the French Academy of Sciences. His Essai sur la theorie des satellites
de Jupiter (Essay on the theory of the satellites of Jupiter, 1766), an expansion of a
memoir presented to the Academy in 1763, showed much original power; and it
was followed up in 1771 by a noteworthy dissertation Sur les inegalites de la
lumiere des satellites de Jupiter (On the inequalities of light of the satellites of
Jupiter).
Meantime, he had gained a high literary reputation by his Éloges of King Charles V
of France, Lacaille, Molière, Pierre Corneille and Gottfried Leibniz, which were
issued in collected form in 1770 and 1790; he was admitted to the Académie
française on February 26, 1784, and to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1785,
when Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's simultaneous membership of all three
72
Academies was renewed in him. From then on, he devoted himself to the history of
science, publishing successively: Histoire de l'astronomie ancienne (A history of
ancient astronomy, 1775); Histoire de l'astronomie moderne (A history of modern
astronomy, 3 vols., 1779-1782); Lettres sur l'origine des sciences (Letters on the
origin of the sciences, 1777); Lettres sur l' Atlantide de Platon (Letters on Plato's
Atlantide , 1779); and Traite de l'astronomie indienne et orientale (A treatise on
Indian and Oriental astronomy, 1787). The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica remarks
that "Their erudition was… marred by speculative extravagances."
The French Revolution interrupted his studies. Elected deputy from Paris to the
Estates-General, he was elected president of the Third Estate (May 5, 1789), led the
famous proceedings in the Tennis Court(June 20), and - immediately after the
storming of the Bastille - became the first mayor of Paris under the newly adopted
system of the Commune (July 15, 1789 to November 16, 1791). The dispersal by
the National Guard, under his orders, of the riotous assembly in the Champ de
Mars (July 17, 1791) made him unpopular, and he retired to Nantes, where he
composed his Mémoires d'un témoin (published in 3 vols. by MM. Berville and
Barrière, 1821-1822), an incomplete narrative of the extraordinary events of his
public life. Late in 1793, Bailly left Nantes to join his friend Pierre Simon Laplace at
Melun, but was there recognized, arrested and brought (November 10) before the
Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris. On November 12 he was guillotined amid the
insults of a howling mob. In the words of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "He
met his death with patient dignity; having, indeed, disastrously shared the
enthusiasms of his age, but taken no share in its crimes."The lunar crater Bailly
was named in his honor.
Ed. Note – his friendship with Laplace explains the great admiration Laplace had
for Indic contributions to Mathematics.
73
53
Sir William Jones (1746- The founder of Indology in the modern era, largely responsible for postulating a
Proto Indo European language for which no speakers have been found and for
1794)
misdating the chronology of ancient India, The real pioneer of Indology, Sir
William Jones (1746-94), was a gifted linguist and founder of the Royal Asiatic
Society. Jones was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court and was a confidante
of Warren Hastings (1732-1818.) Jones ostensibly became an ardent admirer of
India. He wrote, "I am in love with Gopia, charmed with Crishen (Krishna), an
enthusiastic admirer of Raama and a devout adorer of Brihma (Brahma), Bishen
(Vishnu), Mahisher (Maheshwara); not to mention that Judishteir, Arjen, Corno
(Yudhishtira, Arjuna, Karna) and the other warriors of the Mahabharat appear
greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax and Achilles appeared when I first read
the Iliad" (Mukharji S.N., Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth Century British
Attitudes to India, Orient Longman, 1987). However, he remained true to the
Biblical dogma of Genesis which he took to be a literal account. His chronology
for ancient India, including the dating of Chandragupta Maurya to the period of
Alexander's invasion of India was dictated at least in part by the Biblical dogma
that there was no possibility of any civilization existing before 4004 BCE. Jones
may not have had an ulterior motive in doing this but, his disinclination to go
against his scriptures renders his conclusions suspect. In 1786, while delivering
his third lecture, Sir William made the following statement which aroused the
curiosity of many scholars and finally led to the emergence of comparative
linguistics. Noticing the similarities between Sanskrit and the Classical Languages
of Europe such as Greek and Latin he declared:
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of 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 in the forms of grammar, than could not possibly have been
produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them
74
all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source
which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so
forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with
a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old
Persian might be added to the same family..." (Jones, Collected Works, Volume
III : 34-5).
Thus began the study of Indo European languages as one family. Such a study
falls under the rubric of a field known as Philology. Wikipedia defines Philology
as “the study of ancient texts and languages. The term originally meant a love
(Greek philo-) of learning and literature (Greek -logia). In the academic
traditions of several nations, a wide sense of the term "philology" describes the
study of a language together with its literature and the historical and cultural
contexts which are indispensable for an understanding of the literary works
and other culturally significant texts. Philology thus comprises the study of the
grammar, rhetoric, history, interpretation of authors, and critical traditions
associated to a given language. Such a wide-ranging definition is becoming
rare nowadays, and "philology" tends to refer to a study of texts from the
perspective of historical linguistics.
Thus inadvertently Sir William set in motion a chain of events beginning with
the search for a Proto Indo European Language or PIE for short. The puzzling
observation here is that it never occurred to him.or if it did,he apparently gave
it short schrift, that possibly Sanskrit itself could be the grand ancestor to all
the languages of the Indo European languages. Till then Europeans had
assumed that the oldest language related to the European languages was
Hebrew. Given the anti Semitic feelings that were always simmering
underneath the surface in Europe, there was general relief that the roots of
their heritage lay elsewhere than in Hebrew, but Sir William may have realized
that this discovery raised an equally unpalatable deduction. The notion that
75
the heathen millions of India possessed the linguistic technology (in Pannini’s
Ashtadhyayi) to explain the grammars of their own language would perhaps be
equally unacceptable.
Whatever the case may be, there are two major disservices that he did to the
Indic Civilization. One was the possible misdating of Chandragupta Maurya by
several centuries and the other was postulating the assumption of a PIE, which
implied a Urheimat (an ancestral home) from where the Indo Europeans fanned
out to the 4 corners of the Eurasian landmass. By so doing he laid the seeds
for a fractured historical narrative for the Indics, which was not supported by
any Indian legend or folklore. In short he saddled the Indics with perpetually
having to refute dual falsehoods-a false chronology and an imposed ‘Aryan
Invasion or what has been light heartedly called the Aryan Tourist theory.
The hubris with which the colonial overlord rewrote the history of the land with
which he had little acquaintance, is only to be matched by the cupidity with
which the Indics accepted such a narrative , without even a whimper . 600
years of servility to alien emperors and overlords had sapped the self esteem
and the confidence to question the credentials of the interloper and with rare
exceptions, this new revised narrative became the accepted norm for most text
books.
54
76
John Playfair ,FRSE (March John Playfair
10, 1748 – July 20, 1819)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Professor John Playfair was a Scottish scientist.
Playfair was professor of mathematics and later professor of natural philosophy at
the University of Edinburgh. He is perhaps best known for his book Illustrations of
the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which was a summary of the work of
James Hutton. It was through this that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism,
later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience.
In 1795 Playfair created an alternative formulation of Euclid's parallel postulate
called Playfair's axiom.
Early life
Born at Benvie, Angus, Scotland, where his father was parish minister, he was
educated at home until the age of fourteen, when he entered the University of St
Andrews. In 1766, when only eighteen, he was candidate for the chair of
mathematics in Marischal College, Aberdeen, and, although he was unsuccessful,
his claims were admitted to be high.
Six years later he made application for the chair of natural philosophy in his own
university, but again without success, and in 1773 he was offered and accepted
the benefice of the united parishes of Liff and Benvie, vacant by the death of his
father. He continued, however, to carry on his mathematical and physical studies,
and in 1782 he resigned his charge in order to become the tutor of Ferguson of
Raith. By this arrangement he was able to be frequently in Edinburgh and to
cultivate the literary and scientific society for which it was at that time specially
distinguished. In particular, he attended the natural history course of John Walker.
77
Through Nevil Maskelyne, whose acquaintance he had first made in the course of
the celebrated Schiehallion experiments in 1774, he also gained access to the
scientific circles of London. In 1785 when Dugald Stewart succeeded Ferguson in
the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy, Playfair succeeded the former in that of
mathematics.
Mature work
In 1802, he published his celebrated volume entitled Illustrations of the Huttonian
Theory of the Earth. The influence exerted by James Hutton on the development of
geology is thought to be largely due to its publication. In 1805 he exchanged the
chair of mathematics for that of natural philosophy in succession to John
Robison, whom also he succeeded as general secretary to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh. He took a prominent part, on the liberal side, in the ecclesiastical
controversy that arose in connexion with Sir John Leslie's appointment to the post
he had vacated, and published a satirical Letter (1806).
Playfair was an opponent of Gottfried Leibniz's vis viva principle, an early version
of the conservation of energy. In 1808, he launched an attack[1] on John Smeaton
and William Hyde Wollaston's work championing the theory.
He died in Edinburgh.
Family
John's brothers were the celebrated architect James Playfair who died in 1794 and
the engineer William Playfair [2].
78
Honours
•
•
•
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 1807
Craters on Mars and the Moon were named in his honor.
Notes
1. ^ Edinburgh Review, 12, 1808, 120–130
2. ^ Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (1856), reproduced in
Significant Scots
Critical bibliography
A collected edition of Playfair's works, with a memoir by James G. Playfair,
appeared at Edinburgh in 4 vols. 8vo.
His writings include a number of essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review from
1804 onwards, various papers in the Phil. Trans. (including his earliest publication,
" On the Arithmetic of Impossible Quantities," 1779, and an " Account of the
Lithological Survey of Schehallion," 1811) and in the Transactions of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh (" On the Causes which affect the Accuracy of Barometrical
Measurements," &c.), also the articles "Aepinus" and "Physical Astronomy," and a
"Dissertation on the Progress of Mathematical and Physical Science since the
Revival of Learning in Europe," in the Encyclopædia Britannica (Supplement to
fourth, fifth and sixth editions).
His Elements of Geometry first appeared in 1795 and have passed through many
editions; his Outlines of Natural Philosophy (2 vols., 1812-1816) consist of the
79
propositions and formulae which were the basis of his class lectures. Playfair's
contributions to pure mathematics were not considerable, his paper "On the
Arithmetic of Impossible Quantities," that " On the Causes which affect the
Accuracy of Barometrical Measurements," and his Elements of Geometry, all
already referred to, being the most important. His lives of Matthew Stewart, Hutton,
Robison, many of his reviews, and above all his "Dissertation" are of the utmost
value.
External links
•
•
•
•
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "John Playfair". MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
Significant Scots: John Playfair
National Portrait Gallery
References
•
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Playfair"
In 1790, the mathematician John Playfair demonstrated that the starting-date of the
astronomical observations recorded in the tables still in use among Hindu
astrologers (of which three copies had reached Europe between 1687 and 1787)
had to be 4300 BC. Please refer to- Playfair's argumentation, "Remarks on the
astronomy
of
the
Brahmins",
80
Edinburg 1790.
Playfair's mathematical estimate was objected to by John Bentley in 1825, not by a
mathematical or astronomical argument, but as following in "John Bentley: Hindu
Astronomy, republished by Shri Publ., Delhi 1990, p.xxvii;" By his [Playfair's]
attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute facts, he thereby
supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them, under the
pretended
sanction of antiquity. Nay, his aim goes still deeper, for by
the same means he
endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account,
and sap the very foundation of our
religion: for if we are to
believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would
wish
us,
then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction."
So this is the argument that prevailed. Hindu astronomy could not be believed not
because it was flawed, but that it would overturn the orthodoxy of the Christian
church. So much for the scientific temper of western scholarship and their much
vaunted blathering about the importance that they attached to the scientific
approach and the love of proof they inherited from the Greeks
55
Pierre Simon de Laplace
(23
March
1749
in
Beaumont-en-Auge,
Normandy,
France
5 March 1827 in Paris,
France
P. S. Laplace (1814): “The ingenious method of expressing every possible
number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an
absolute value) emerged in India . The idea seems so simple nowadays that its
significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity
lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst
useful inventions. The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated
when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity,
81
Archimedes and Apollonius.” [Dantzig. p. 26]
56
John Bentley (1825)
Hindu Astronomy. Osnabrück. 1970
A historical view of the Hindu astronomy from the earliest dawn of that science in
India to the present time, in two parts : Part I. The ancient astronomy, Part II. The
modern astronomy, with an explanation of the apparent cause of its introduction,
and the various impositions that followed : to which are added I. Hindu tables of
equations, II. Remarks on the Chinese astronomy, III. Translations of certain
hieroglyphics called the Zodiacs of Dendera / Format: microform : Author: Bentley,
John. PuThis title can be found in 1 Iowa libraries
Was one of the first to falsely characterize Indian contributions to astronomy
Playfair's judicious use of astronomy was countered by John Bentley with a
Scriptural
argument which we now must consider invalid. In 1825, Bentley objected: "By his
[= Playfair's] attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute
facts, he thereby supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them,
under the pretended sanction of antiquity. Nay, his aim goes still deeper, for by the
same means he endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very
82
foundation of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books,
as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction."8
Bentley did not object to astronomy per se, in so far as it could be helpful in
showing up the falsehood of Brahmanical scriptures. However, it did precisely the
reverse. Falsehood in this context could have meant that the Brahmanas falsely
claimed high antiquity for their texts by presenting as ancient astronomical
observations recorded in Scripture what were in fact back calculations from a
much later age.
But Playfair showed that such a back calculation was impossible. Back-calculation
of planetary positions is a highly complex affair requiring knowledge of a number
of physical laws, universal physical constants and actual measurements of
densities, diameters and distances. Though Vedic astronomy was remarkably
sophisticated for its time, it could only back-calculate planetary position of the
presumed Vedic age with an inaccuracy margin of at least several degrees of arc.
With our modern knowledge, it is easy to determine what the actual positions
were, and what the results of back-calculations with the Vedic Jyotish formulae
would have been, e.g.:"Aldebaran was therefore 40' before the point of the vernal
equinox, according to the Indian astronomy, in the year 3102 before Christ. (...)
[Modern astronomy] gives the longitude of that star 13' from the vernal equinox, at
the time of the Calyougham, agreeing, within 53', with the determination of the
Indian astronomy. This agreement is the more remarkable, that the Brahmins, by
their own rules for computing the motion of the fixed stars, could not have
assigned this place to Aldebaran for the beginning of Calyougham, had they
calculated it from a modern observation. For as they make the motion of the fixed
8
John Bentley: Hindu Astronomy, republished by Shri Publ., Delhi 1990, p.xxvii; also
discussed by Richard L. Thompson: "World Views: Vedic vs. Western", The India Times,
83
stars too great by more than 3'' annually, if they had calculated backward from
1491, they would have placed the fixed stars less advanced by 4° or 5°, at their
ancient epoch, than they have actually done."5 So, it turns out that the data given
by the Brahmins corresponded not with the results deduced from their formulae,
but with the actual positions, and this, according to Playfair, for nine different
astronomical parameters. This is a bit much to explain away as coincidence or
sheer luck.
The accusation that the ancient Vedics falsified the evidence on order to claim
greater antiquity is ironic and flies in the face of all available evidence. It is ironic
because the Indologists have always maintained that the ancient Indic was
lackadaisical about historical dates and generally indifferent to precision in
Historical dating. In this as in other statements of this nature they fail to offer any
standards of comparison since prior to the Roman era there was little recording of
history in Europe and even thereafter there was very little recording of Births and
deaths, except in the case of famous celebrities such as Kings and Queens.
Despite the fact that India has the single most ancient dynastic record in the many
Puranas anywhere in the known Galaxy, the charge is often made mainly by
European historians (and parroted faithfully by a section of the Indians) that
Indians were indifferent to History. We find such a viewpoint to be without any
merit’
2.2. Ancient observation, modern confirmation
That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later
backcalculation, was also argued by Playfair's contemporary, the French
astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly: "the motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus
before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modern] tables of
84
Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon
as that discovered by Tycho Brahe -- a variation unknown to the school of
Alexandria and also to the Arabs".6
4 John Bentley: Hindu Astronomy, republished by Shri Publ., Delhi 1990, p.xxvii;
also
discussed by Richard L. Thompson: "World Views: Vedic vs. Western", The India
Times,
31-3-1993. On p.111, we find that Bentley has "proven" that Krishna was born on 7
August
in AD 600 (the most conservative estimate elsewhere is the 9th century BC), and
on p.158
ff., that Varaha Mihira (AD 510-587) was a contemporary of the Moghul emperor
Akbar
(r.1556-1605).
5 J. Playfair in Dharampal: Indian Science and Technology, p.87.
57
Sir Charles Wilkins (1749- Translated the Bhagavad Gita in 1785, the Hitopadesa in 1787, and the Shakuntala
1836)
episode in the M’Bharata in 1795. Was the first British officer of the East India
Company to acquire adequate proficiency in the Sanskrit language.
58
59
60
Nathaniel
Brassey Published a Code of Gentoo Laws in 1776 subtitled Ordinations of the Pundits. In
Halhead(1761-1830)
1787 Halhead also translated the Dara Shikoh (Aurangzebs brother brutally
murdered by him) version of the Upanishads into English. But Sir William did not
find his effort very useful, as it had too many errors.
German
Indology
(1700 The Bhagavad-Gita, helped to shape the world view of Germany.
1900)
When they became aware of the vast wealth of literature awaiting their perusal,
85
German scholars like Friedrich von Schlegel and Baron Ferdinand Eckstein
became Sanskrit scholars. German schools and Universities quickly established
departments of sanskrit studies, long before they showed up in England
The "native land" of Indic studies may have been England, but it is German
philosophers,linguists and mathematicians that were awed by the European
discovery of India’s vast and stunning literature in the various arts an sciences. In
Jena, Weimar and Heidelberg, then at Bonn, Berlin and Tübingen oriental studies
were established during the 1790s "like a rapid-fire series of explosions."9
(Raymond Schwab in Oriental Renaissance, p. 53). The many translations of Indian
texts produced by the English in India were available to German philosophers
when their interest in India's spiritual philosophy was awakened. Charles Wilkins'
translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, had become a favourite book among Westerners
throughout Europe, and together with other translations, found its widest audience
in Germany.
The brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August Wilhelm von Schlegel used their
own printing press in 1823 to publish August Wilhelm's Latin translation of the
Bhagavad-Gita, with the original Sanskrit text. European scholars commended it.
This translation was to be an important resource for Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and, later, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770--1831), both of whom gave
it their undivided attention.
Wilhelm von Humboldt claimed that his familiarity with the Oupnek'hat [Upanishads], the
Manusmriti, Burnouf's extracts from the Padmapurana and Colebrooke's essay, "On the Religion
and Philosophy of the Indians," enabled him to comprehend the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita.
9
Schwab, Raymond. 1984. The Oriental Renaissance. New York: Columbia University
Press
86
(Hiltrud Rüstao, "From Indology to Indian Studies: Some Considerations," Bulletin of the
Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, March 1998, p. 126. [Hereafter: "From Indology to Indian
Studies"]) He wrote that "this episode of the Mahabharata is the most beautiful, nay, perhaps even
the only true philosophical poem which we can find in all the literatures known to us," (Quotation
from Maurice Winternitz, A History of Indian Literature, Vol. 1, part 2, Second ed. (Calcutta:
University of Calcutta, 1963) p. 375, Citation from India's Contribution, p. 166) and ranked the Gita
above the works of Lucretius, Parmenides and Empedocles." (India's Contribution, p. 166) After
looking into the Gita, he wrote to his friend, statesman Frederick von Gentz in 1827:
I read the Indian poem for the first time when I was in my country estate in Silesia and, while doing
so, I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let me live to be acquainted with this
work. It must be the most profound and sublime thing to be found in the, world. (Citation from P.
Nagaraja Rao, The Bhagavad Gita (The Quest for the Moral Ideal, Religious Values and the
Affirmation of Faith), (Madras: -- The Author, 1986), p. 20.)
Humboldt wanted to inform the world of the concept of God that he found and
appreciated in the Bhagavad-Gita. With as much capacity to plumb the scripture's
depths as could be cultivated at that time, he set himself to broadcast its
teachings with an open mind. His lecture on the Bhagavad-Gita. at Berlin's Royal
Academy of Sciences to Prussia's intellectual elite in 1825 (Art, Culture and
Spirituality, p. 359) stirs the reader's mind to this day. It was published in 1826. He
appeared again at the Academy one year later, this time with his analysis of the
Gita's Advaitic structure founded on Samkhya philosophy, and summarized the
Gita's discourses and poetic value in great detail. (From Indology to Indian
Studies, pp. 126-127)
The first Humboldt lecture on the Bhagavad Gita caught the attention of George
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He published a review of it in 1827 that contributed a
critical and appreciative analysis. Hegel felt Humboldt's lecture to be "an essential
enrichment of the knowledge of the Indian way of concepts of the highest spiritual
interests". (G. W. F. HegeL Werke (Works), Vol. 20, 59. Citation from "From
87
Indology to Indian Studies," p. 128) and his penetrating review served to promote
Humboldt's work.
Freidrich von Schlegel (1772--1829) was the first German to study Sanskrit and
Indian religion and philosophy in depth.(Swami Ashokananda, The Influence of
Indian Thought on the Thought of the West (Mayavati, Advaita Ashrama, 1931), p.
20). His interest in India was greatly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel
produced his eminent pioneering work, On the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians: A Contribution to the Foundation of Antiquity (Über die Sprache und
Weisheit der Indier), in 1808. it was the primary publication of nineteenth-century
European Indology in the German language, acknowledged for its scholarly
translations of extracts from the Sanskrit texts of the Bhagavad Gita and the
Ramayana. His words in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier hailed the
contribution of Vedanta, and were later brought to life by Max Müller in his lecture,
"Origin of the Vedanta":
It cannot be denied that the early Indians possessed a knowledge of
the true God; all their writings are replete with sentiments and
expressions, noble, clear, and severely grand; as deeply conceived
and reverentially expressed as in any human language in which men
have spoken of their God. . . The divine origin of man, as taught in
Vedanta, is continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to
animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and
reincorporating with Divinity as the one primary object of every action
and reaction. Even the highest form of European philosophy, the
idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, seems,
when compared to the bounteous light and force of oriental idealism,
to be no more than a feeble Promethean spark within the full celestial
splendor of the noonday sun, a thin flickering spark always on the
88
point of burning out. (Friedrich von Schlegel, Indian Language,
Literature and Philosophy, p. 471).
August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767--1845) hoped to inspire a new ethics and
was the first to publish standard text editions with penetrating commentaries and
translations in classical Latin of the Bhagavad Gita, Hitopadesha and the
Ramayana. (Influence of Indian Thought, p. 20). Between 1820 and 1830 he
published Indische Bibliothek, a collection of Indian texts. He is considered the
founder of Sanskrit philology in Germany. His unrestrained praise for the
Bhagavad Gita elicited this fervent remark:
If the study of Sanskrit had brought nothing more than the
satisfaction of being able to read this superb poem in the original, I
would have been amply compensated for all my labours. It is a
sublime reunion of poetic and philosophical genius. (Oriental
Renaissance, p. 90.
In 1932, the German scholar and Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto (1869--1937)
wrote a ground breaking work on the subject of mysticism in comparative religion.
Otto regarded the Bhagavad Gita as an excellent example of mysterium
tremendum and understood the significance of Vedanta for the West. Otto's
premise was that within the vast diversity of mystical expression a "deep-rooted
kinship. . . . unquestionably exists between the souls of Oriental and Occidental."
(Bhimsen Gupta, The Glassy Essence: A Study of E. M. Forster, L. H. Myers and
Aldous Huxley in Relation to Indian Thought (Kurukshetra: Kurukshetra
University, 1976), p. 20)
Part 4 of this article. For other parts of this article, see How Vedanta Came
89
to the West
Comments
on
this
article
can
be
sent
to:
[email protected]
Books by Swami Tathagatananda (organized by the year of publication):
1. The Vedanta Society of New York -- A Brief History, 2000
2. Mahabharat--Katha (Bengali), 1998
3. Ramayan Anudhyan (Bengali), 1996
4. Healthy Values of Living, 1996
5. Meditation on Swami Vivekananda, 1994
6. Meditation on Shri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, 1993
7. Albert Einstein and His Human Face, 1993
8. Glimpses of Great Lives, 1989
9. Shubha Chinta (Bengali), 1988
10. Smaran--Manan (Bengali), 1987
Please contact Vedanta Society of New York for these and other books on
Vedanta.
Other Vedanta Centers nearest you.
Our
90
Lecture
and
Class
Schedules.
61
Abbe Parraud (173X ?). In
« Le premier ouvrage traduit est la Bhagavad-Gîtâ en 1785 en anglais à Londres
fact it is his work that was par
Wilkins,
puis
en
français
en
1787
par
l’abbé
Parraud. »
influential in the subsequent http://www.europsy.org/marc-alain/histyog.html
interest that the
French
sahowed in Indiligy
In 1787, Abbé Parraud retranslated Wilkins' English version [of the BhagavadGita] into French. Within a short span of time, other brilliant translations of
Sanskrit books from the Asiatic Society of Bengal became well known in
revolutionary France. Louis Matthieu Langlès, curator of oriental manuscripts at
the Bibliothèque Nationale and its provisional specialist on India, documented
Indic research. Langlès was well aware of the importance of the Asiatic Society.
For the benefit of scholars everywhere, he included the history and bibliography of
the early publications of the Society in the third volume of the Magasin
Encyclopédique. (Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's
Discovery of India and the East, 1836--1886, New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 55)
62
Colonel Colin
(1753-1821)
Mackenzie
From Bernard Cohn
91
63
Sir Thomas Munro (27 May
1761-6 July 1827), Scottish
soldier and statesman, was
born at Glasgow, the son of
a merchant called Alexander
Munro. Thomas's
grandfather was Alexander
Munro III, a professor of
anatomy at Edinburgh
University.
Sir Thomas Munro was one of the British colonialists(a Scot to boot) who served
his country with honor and integrity, while being well versed in the sacred books
of India
Thomas was educated at the University of Glasgow. While at school, Thomas was
distinguished for a singular openness of temper, a mild and generous disposition,
with great personal courage and presence of mind. Being naturally of a robust
frame of body, he surpassed all his school-fellows in athletic exercises, and was
particularly eminent as a boxer. He was at first intended to enter his father's
business, but in 1789 was appointed to an infantry cadetship in Madras.
He served with his regiment during the hard-fought war against Haidar Ali (17801783), and again in the first campaign against Tipu Sultan (1790-1792). He was
then chosen as one of four military officers to administer the Baramahal, part of
the territory acquired from Tipu, where he remained for seven years learning the
principles of revenue survey and assessment which he afterwards applied
throughout the presidency of Madras.
After the final downfall of Tipu in 1799, he spent a short time restoring order in
Kanara; and then for another seven years (1800-1807) he was placed in charge of
the northern district "ceded" by the Nizam of Hyderabad, where he introduced the
ryotwari system of land revenue.
After a long furlough in the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, during which he
gave valuable evidence upon matters connected with the renewal of the British
East India Company's charter, he returned to Madras in 1814 with special
instructions to reform the judicial and police systems.
In 1820, he was appointed governor of Madras, where he founded the systems of
92
revenue assessment and general administration which substantially remain to the
present day. His official minutes, published by Sir A. Arbuthnot, form a manual of
experience and advice for the modern civilian. He died of cholera while on tour in
the "ceded" districts, where his name is preserved by more than one memorial. An
equestrian statue of him, by Francis Legatt Chantrey, stands in Madras city.
The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams still hold a huge cauldron gifted by him
called MUNRO GANGALAM in which food for the Lord Venkateswara is prepared
even though Lord Munro never visited the temple.
Quote
In asserting that Europe could learn a lot from India,Sir Thomas was quite
emphatic
"If a good system of agriculture, unrivalled manufacturing skill, a capacity to
produce whatever can contribute to convenience or luxury, schools established in
every village for teaching, reading, writing and arithmetic; the general practice of
hospitality and charity among each other; and above all, a treatment of the female
sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, (if all these) are among the signs
which denote a civilized people, then the Hindus, are not inferior to the nations of
Europe; and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and
India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland
p.324-325) and The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino p. 13).
93
Statue
Sculpted by Francis Chanterey, and sitting proud and straight on his horse, in the
middle of Chennai's famed Island, is The Stirrupless Majesty[1]. Either due to an
oversight, or depicting his affinity for bareback riding, Sir Thomas Munro's statue
shows him without saddle and stirrup.[2]
References
1. ^
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2003/06/04/stories/2003060400180300.htm
S. Muthiah, " Relics of Company times", The Hindu, June 4, 2003.
2. ^ ChandraChoodan Gopalakrishnan, "The stirrup-less majesty" Chennai
Metblogs.com (March 23, 2006)
•
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain
External Links
•
•
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/munro_thomas.htm
Thomas Munro Statue
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Munro"
94
64
William Carey (1761-1834)
Missionary William Carey (1761-1834) was the pioneer of the modern missionary
enterprise in India, and of western (missionary) scholarship in oriental studies.
Carey was an English oriental scholar and the founder of the Baptist Missionary
Society. From 1801 onward, as Professor of Oriental Languages, he composed
numerous philosophical works, consisting of 'grammars and dictionaries in the
Marathi, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Bengali and Bhatanta dialects. From the
Serampor press, there issued in his life time, over 200,000 Bibles and portions in
nearly 40 different languages and dialects, Carey himself undertaking most of
the literary work. 3
Carey and his colleagues experimented with what came to be known as Church
Sanskrit. He wanted to train a group of 'Christian Pandits' who would probe "these
mysterious sacred nothings" and expose them as worthless. He was distressed
that this "golden casket (of Sanskrit) exquisitely wrought" had remained "filled
with nothing but pebbles and trash." He was determined to fill it with "riches beyond all price," that is, the doctrine of Christianity. 4
In fact, Carey smuggled himself into India and caused so much trouble that the
British government labeled him as a political danger. After confiscating a batch of
Bengali pamphlets printed by Carey, the Governor-general Lord Minto described
them as –
"Scurrilous invective…Without arguments of any kind, they were filled
with hell fire and still hotter fire, denounced against a whole race of
men merely for believing the religion they were taught by their
fathers."
Unfortunately Carey and other preachers of his ilk finally gained permission to
continue their campaigns without government approval.
95
Other Preachers
65
Indology in France
France Becomes a Center for Indian Studies
In 1787, Abbé Parraud retranslated Wilkins' English version [of the Bhagavad-Gita]
into French. Within a short span of time, other brilliant translations of Sanskrit
books from the Asiatic Society of Bengal became well known in revolutionary
France. Louis Matthieu Langlès, curator of oriental manuscripts at the
Bibliothèque Nationale and its provisional specialist on India, documented Indic
research. Langlès was well aware of the importance of the Asiatic Society. For the
benefit of scholars everywhere, he included the history and bibliography of the
early publications of the Society in the third volume of the Magasin
Encyclopédique. (Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's
Discovery of India and the East, 1836--1886, New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 55)
Beginning in 1800, France became a center for Indian studies when the
accumulated Indian manuscripts languishing in the Bibliothèque Nationale began
to be prepared for inventory. The Asiatic Researches: Transactions of the Society
(published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal from 1788) (Ibid., 39) had been
published in Calcutta in 1805 and were being translated into French along with the
works of both Wilkins and Sir William Jones.
In 1832, a French translation of the Bhagavad-Gila was made directly from the
Sanskrit by Jean-Denis Languinais and published posthumously. Languinais had
written of the "great surprise" it was "to find among these fragments of an
extremely ancient epic poem from India. . . a completely spiritual pantheism. . .
and. . . the vision of all-in-God . . ."(Art, Culture and Spirituality: A Prabuddha
96
Bharata Centenary Perspective (1896--1996), Swami Atmaramanananda and M.
Sivaramakrishna, comps. and eds. (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1997), 161)
By the late eighteenth century, French writers acquired intimate knowledge of
Indian literature. Sensing that India possessed a great richness of spiritual unity,
Henri Frédéric Amiel, a contemporary of Victor Hugo, saw the need of
"Brahmanising souls" for the spiritual welfare of humanity. (Sisir Kumar Mitra,
Vision of India, New Delhi: Crest Publishing House, 1984, 202)
The Significance of France in German Indology
France played a unique role in the advancement of Indic studies in Germany when
Paris became the "capital of nascent Indology." Together with Wilkins, Jones and
others, British Lieutenant Alexander Hamilton (an employee of the East India
Company) was among the first twenty-four charter members of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal (The Oriental Renaissance, 39) and played a very important role in the
focus of Sanskrit studies in Germany.
While serving in the British Navy, Lt. Hamilton was sent to Paris to collate Sanskrit
manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale for a new edition of Wilkins' translation
of the Hitopadesha. Hamilton was the only one apart from Wilkins who knew
Sanskrit and who lived in Europe at the time. In 1803, during the war between
France and England, the orientalist Claude de Saint-Martin expressed his
enthusiasm for "the numerous treasures that the literature of India is beginning to
offer us," in his Le ministère de l'homme-esprit. (op. cit., 236). In the same year
Hamilton became a paroled prisoner in Paris, but received special treatment due to
his scholarly associations. Orientalist Constantine Volney was interested in
Hamilton's work and protected Hamilton's right to continue cataloguing the
manuscripts. (Ibid., 67). Hamilton expresses his gratitude by teaching Sanskrit to
97
Volney and few others. Among them were the father of Eugène Burnouf (a Latin
scholar), Louis Matthieu Langlés, Claude Fauriel---and Friedrich von Schlegel.
Schlegel was in Paris at the time and began studying Sanskrit three hours a day
with Hamilton (he continued to study it on his own for four years). Between 1803
and 1804, Friedrich von Schlegel used the Sanskrit he learned from Hamilton to
translate excerpts from the Indian epics and the Laws of Manu. In 1804 he taught a
private course on world literature in Paris and included Indian works. (Ibid., 67-70). His influence on his brother, August Wilhelm who surpassed him in Sanskrit,
occurred at this time.
Part 3 of this article. For other parts of this article, see How Vedanta Came to the West
Comments on this article can be sent to: [email protected]
66
Henry Thomas Colebrook
(1765-1837)
(June 15, 1765 - March 18,
1837)
Studied Sanskrit from the Pundits and wrote on the Vedas
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, indologist: letters to Henry Thomas
Colebrooke, Sanskrit scholar 1821-28 (Mss Eur C841)
Colebrooke's essay, "On the Religion and Philosophy of the Indians,"
Henry Thomas Colebrooke (June 15, 1765 - March 18, 1837) was an English
orientalist.
Henry Thomas Colebrooke, third son of Sir George Colebrooke, a Second Baronet,
was born in London. He was educated at home; and when only fifteen he had
made considerable attainments in classics and mathematics. From the age of
twelve to sixteen he resided in France, and in 1782 was appointed to a writership
98
in India. About a year after his arrival there he was placed in the board of accounts
in Calcutta; and three years later he was removed to a situation in the revenue
department at Tirhut. In 1789 he was removed to Purneah, where he investigated
the resources of that part of the country, and published his Remarks on the
Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal, privately printed in 1795, in which he
advocated free trade between Great Britain and India.
After eleven years' residence in India, Colebrooke began the study of the Sanskrit
language; and to him was confided the translation of the great Digest of Hindu
Laws, a monumental study of Hindu law which had been left unfinished by Sir
William Jones. He translated the two treatises, the Mitacshara of Vijnaneshwara
and the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana, under the title Law of Inheritance. He was
sent to Nagpur in 1799 on a special mission, and on his return was made a judge
of the new court of appeal, over which he afterwards presided.
In 1805 Lord Wellesley appointed him professor of Hindu law and Sanskrit at the
college of Fort William. During his residence at Calcutta he wrote his Sanskrit
Grammar (1805), some papers on the religious ceremonies of the Hindus, and his
Essay on the Vedas (1805), for a long time the standard work in English on the
subject. He became member of council in 1807 and returned to England seven
years later. He was a director of the Royal Asiatic Society, and many of the most
valuable papers in the society's Transactions were communicated by him.
His life was written by his son, Sir T.E. Colebrooke, in 1873.
Works
99
•
•
67
On the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus By Henry Thomas Colebrooke
Miscellaneous Essays By Henry Thomas Colebrooke
Abbe Dubois, Jean Antoine went to India to convert the heathen returned discouraged that it was very difficult
(1765-1848)
too accomplish
Jean-Antoine Abbe Dubois
French missionary in India, b. in 1765 at St. Remèze (Ardèche); d. in Paris, 17 Feb.,
1848. The Abbé Dubois was a director of the Seminary of the Foreign Missions, a
member of the Royal Societies of Great Britain and Paris, and of the Literary
Society of Madras. At the outbreak of the French Revolution he went to India to
preach Christianity to the natives, whose favor he soon won by his affability and
patience. For their instruction he composed elementary treatises on Christian
doctrine which won general commendation. Though he remained thirty-two years
in that arduous field, his labors were all fruitless and he returned convinced that
the conversion of the Hindus with the deep-rooted prejudices of centuries was
impossible under the existing conditions. This opinion which he broached in
"Letters on the State of Christianity in India" etc. (London, 1823), was vigorously
attacked in England. Two Anglican ministers, James Hough and H. Townley,
published, respectively, "A Reply to the Letters of the Abbé Dubois" etc. (London,
1824) and "An Answer to the Abbé Dubois" (London, 1824). "The Friend of India",
a journal of Calcutta (1825), contained a refutation of his letters, to which the abbe
rejoined in a letter of much gravity and moderation. It found its way into the
"Bulletin des Sciences", May, 1825, and the first volume of the "Asiatic Journal"
(1841). Besides these letters he wrote: "Description of the Character, Manners and
Customs of the People of India, and of their Institutions, religious and civil"
100
(London, 1816). This work was bought by the East India Company for twenty
thousand francs and printed at their expense. The author published an enlarged
edition in French under the title "Moeurs, institutions, et cérémonies des peuples
de l'Inde" (Paris, 1825, 2 vols.), which is considered the best and most complete
work on the subject. "Exposé de quelques-uns des principaux articles de la
théologie des Brahmes" (Paris, 1825); "Le Pantcha-tantra ou les cinq ruses, fables
du Brahme Vichnou-Sarma" (Paris, 1826). Abbé Dubois was one of the
collaborators of the "Bulletin Universel des Sciences" of the Baron de Férussac
Mantras of Anti-Brahminism
QUOTE
Secondly, regarding their secret books, Grant claimed that ‘[w]ith respect to the
real tenets of the Hindus…they are to be taken from their ancient books…’ (cited in
Mill 1817: 410 ff). However, when Rammohun Roy later translated the Upanishads
a contemporary pundit charged him with having fabricated them himself (Hay
1963: 46 ff). Moreover, on the subject of Bengal, Fitzedward Hall wrote in 1868 that
‘[u]ntil very recently, the learned Bengali has long been satisfied, substantially, to
do without the Veda’ (cited in Kejariwal 1988: 3). A strange state of affairs,
suggesting that brahmanas didn’t really know what Europeans were talking about
when they enquired about their sacred books. Even more, those who did seem to
know about the texts didn’t seem to understand them. Regarding their secret
language, Abbé Dubois, for example, had the following observation to make:
It is true…that those who devote themselves to the study of these books (the
Vedas) cannot hope to extract any instruction from them, for they are written in
ancient Sanskrit, which has become almost wholly unintelligible; and such
numberless mistakes have been introduced by copyists, either through
carelessness or ignorance, that the most learned find themselves quite unable to
interpret the original text. Out of 20,000 brahmanas I do not believe that one could
be found who even partially understood the real Vedas [Dubois 1816: 173-74].
101
What Dubois saw was not the exception but the rule. When talking of the prayers
in the Vedas, Horace Hayman Wilson discovered that they were hardly studied at
all. Besides, ‘when they are studied it is merely for the sake of repeating the
words; the sense is regarded as a matter of no importance, and is not understood
even by the Brahmana who recites or chants the expressions’ (1840: 49).
There were other elements as well that did not fit the picture of a class of priests
that controlled the laity through the corruption of original beliefs. Wilson, for
example, felt it necessary to nuance Jones’ views as based on Manu’s text, stating
that brahmanas were not ‘in great measure the ghostly advisers of the
people…This office is now filled by various persons…Many of these are
brahmanas, but they are not necessarily so, and it is not as Brahmanas that they
receive the veneration of their lay followers…’ (1832: 311).
However, when Indian intellectuals began to write their own story, they did not
start from those experiences. Neither did they try to make them intelligible: India,
as they saw it, had its own religion of priests and the hierarchy of caste system
was due to priestly despotism. The implication of this account is the unconditional
acceptance of Christianity’s theological conception of religion by Indian
intellectuals.
]
IX
102
103
68
August Wilhelm Schlegel Lecturer in Sanskrit , Bonn University
(1767-1845) one of two
Schlegel brothers , the other
was Freidrich von Schlegel
(1772--1829)
The first Humboldt lecture on the Bhagavad Gita caught the attention of George
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He published a review of it in 1827 that contributed a
critical and appreciative analysis. Hegel felt Humboldt's lecture to be "an essential
enrichment of the knowledge of the Indian way of concepts of the highest spiritual
interests". (G. W. F. HegeL Werke (Works), Vol. 20, 59. Citation from "From
Indology to Indian Studies," p. 128) and his penetrating review served to promote
Humboldt's work.
Freidrich von Schlegel (1772--1829) was the first German to study Sanskrit and
Indian religion and philosophy in depth.(Swami Ashokananda, The Influence of
Indian Thought on the Thought of the West (Mayavati, Advaita Ashrama, 1931), p.
20). His interest in India was greatly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel
produced his eminent pioneering work, On the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians: A Contribution to the Foundation of Antiquity (Über die Sprache und
Weisheit der Indier), in 1808. it was the primary publication of nineteenth-century
European Indology in the German language, acknowledged for its scholarly
translations of extracts from the Sanskrit texts of the Bhagavad Gita and the
Ramayana. His words in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier hailed the
contribution of Vedanta, and were later brought to life by Max Müller in his lecture,
"Origin of the Vedanta":
It cannot be denied that the early Indians possessed a knowledge of the true God;
all their writings are replete with sentiments and expressions, noble, clear, and
severely grand; as deeply conceived and reverentially expressed as in any human
language in which men have spoken of their God. . . The divine origin of man, as
104
taught in Vedanta, is continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to
animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and
reincorporating with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and
reaction. Even the highest form of European philosophy, the idealism of reason as
it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, seems, when compared to the bounteous
light and force of oriental idealism, to be no more than a feeble Promethean spark
within the full celestial splendor of the noonday sun, a thin flickering spark always
on the point of burning out. (Friedrich von Schlegel, Indian Language, Literature
and Philosophy, p. 471).
August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767--1845) hoped to inspire a new ethics and
was the first to publish standard text editions with penetrating commentaries and
translations in classical Latin of the Bhagavad Gita, Hitopadesha and the
Ramayana. (Influence of Indian Thought, p. 20). Between 1820 and 1830 he
published Indische Bibliothek, a collection of Indian texts. He is considered the
founder of Sanskrit philology in Germany. His unrestrained praise for the
Bhagavad Gita elicited this fervent remark:
If the study of Sanskrit had brought nothing more than the satisfaction of being
able to read this superb poem in the original, I would have been amply
compensated for all my labours. It is a sublime reunion of poetic and philosophical
genius. (Oriental Renaissance, p. 90.
105
69
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich
Alexander
Freiherr
von
Humboldt (help·info)
(September 14, 1769, Berlin
– May 6, 1859, Berlin)
70
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian
Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von
Humboldt (June 22, 1767 –
April 8, 1835), government
functionary,
diplomat,
philosopher, founder of
Humboldt Universität in
106
Wilhelm von Humboldt claimed that his familiarity with the Oupnek'hat
[Upanishads], the Manusmriti, Burnouf's extracts from the Padmapurana and
Colebrooke's essay, "On the Religion and Philosophy of the Indians," enabled him
to comprehend the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita. (Hiltrud Rüstao, "From
Indology to Indian Studies: Some Considerations," Bulletin of the Ramakrishna
Mission Institute of Culture, March 1998, p. 126. [Hereafter: "From Indology to
Indian Studies"]) He wrote that "this episode of the Mahabharata is the most
Berlin, friend of Goethe and
especially of Schiller, is
especially remembered as a
German
linguist
who
introduced a knowledge of
the Basque language to
European intellectuals.
beautiful, nay, perhaps even the only true philosophical poem which we can find in
all the literatures known to us," (Quotation from Maurice Winternitz, A History of
Indian Literature, Vol. 1, part 2, Second ed. (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1963)
p. 375, Citation from India's Contribution, p. 166) and ranked the Gita above the
works of Lucretius, Parmenides and Empedocles." (India's Contribution, p. 166)
After looking into the Gita, he wrote to his friend, statesman Frederick von Gentz
in 1827:
I read the Indian poem for the first time when I was in my country estate in Silesia
and, while doing so, I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let
me live to be acquainted with this work. It must be the most profound and sublime
thing to be found in the, world. (Citation from P. Nagaraja Rao, The Bhagavad Gita
(The Quest for the Moral Ideal, Religious Values and the Affirmation of Faith),
(Madras: -- The Author, 1986), p. 20.)
Humboldt wanted to inform the world of the concept of God that he found and
appreciated in the Bhagavad-Gita. With as much capacity to plumb the scripture's
depths as could be cultivated at that time, he set himself to broadcast its
teachings with an open mind. His lecture on the Bhagavad-Gita. at Berlin's Royal
Academy of Sciences to Prussia's intellectual elite in 1825 (Art, Culture and
Spirituality, p. 359) stirs the reader's mind to this day. It was published in 1826. He
appeared again at the Academy one year later, this time with his analysis of the
Gita's Advaitic structure founded on Samkhya philosophy, and summarized the
Gita's discourses and poetic value in great detail. (From Indology to Indian
Studies, pp. 126-127)
The first Humboldt lecture on the Bhagavad Gita caught the attention of George
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He published a review of it in 1827 that contributed a
critical and appreciative analysis. Hegel felt Humboldt's lecture to be "an essential
107
enrichment of the knowledge of the Indian way of concepts of the highest spiritual
interests". (G. W. F. HegeL Werke (Works), Vol. 20, 59. Citation from "From
Indology to Indian Studies," p. 128) and his penetrating review served to promote
Humboldt's work.
71
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day
Hegel (August 27, 1770 – southwest Germany. His influence has been widespread on writers of widely
varying positions, including both his admirers (F. H. Bradley, Sartre, Hans Küng,
November 14, 1831)
Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Karl Marx), and his detractors (Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling). He introduced, arguably for the
first time in philosophy, the idea that
History and the
concrete are important in getting out
of the circle of
philosophia
perennis,
i.e.,
the
perennial
problems of philosophy. He also
stressed
the
importance of the Other in the coming
to be of selfawareness
(see
master-slave
dialectic).
We are primarily concrned here with
his ideas on Indic
studies. The invasion theory of Indian
History was first
postulated by Hegel in his Philosophy
of History that
India lacked historical agency and
that India was a
cultural cul de sac from which nothing worthwhile ever emanated.
108
72
73
James
Mill
(1773-1836). Completed The History of British India in 1817. Had an extremely jaundiced view
(father of the philosopher of Indic traditions.
John Stuart Mill)
The eminent British historian James Mill who had published his voluminous
History of British India in 1818 heavily criticized Jones. Although Mill spoke no
Indian languages, had never studied Sanskrit, and had never been to India, his
damning indictment of Indian culture and religion had become a standard work for
all Britishers who would serve in India. Mill vehemently believed that India had
never had a glorious past and treated this as an historical fantasy. To him, Indian
religion meant, ‘The worship of the emblems of generative organs’ and ascribing
to God, ‘…an immense train of obscene acts.’ Suffice to say that he disagreed
violently with Jones for his ‘Hypothesis of a high state of civilization.’ Mill’s
History of British India was greatly influenced by the famous French missionary
Abbe Dubois’s book Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. This work, which
still enjoys a considerable amount of popularity to this day, contains one chapter
on Hindu temples, wherein the Abbe writes:
"Hindu imagination is such that it cannot be excited except by what is
monstrous and extravagant."
109
James Mill is one of the key British indologists who deserves the credit for the
low esteem that the indic civilization Is held in today. It is also legitimate to
question the shoddiness of British scholarship during that era, that such a
blatantly racist view was tolerated and even encouraged by the elite of Britain
74
Montstuart
Elphinstone
Montstuart Elphinstone was born on October 6, 1779, in Dumbarton,
Dumbartonshire. He entered the Civil Service with the East India Company at
Calcutta in 1795. In 1801, he escaped massacre in Benaras by the followers of
the deposed Wajid Ali Shah. He transferred to the Diplomatic Service in 1801
Born: October 6, 1779, and was posted to the court of Peshwa Baji Rao II, became resident at Nagpur
in 1804, was sent to the Maratha court at Gwalior in 1807, concluded
Dumbarton,
negotiations with Shah Shuja of Afghanistan about Napoleon's planned
Dumbartonshire,
advance on India in 1808, and was sent back to the court in Pune in 1811. He
Scotland.
Died:
November
20, was responsible for the defeat of the Peshwa at the Battle of Kirki in November
1817.
1859, Surrey, England.
He became the Commissioner of the Deccan in 1818 and was the Governor of
Bombay between 1819 and 1827. He was reputed to be an enlightened man
for his times. Elphinstone returned his kingdom to the Raja of Satara, and their
lands to many landowners and temples. He was responsible for the beginning
of higher education in Bombay at a time when the opinion in Britain was
against educating the "native". Elphinstone College in Bombay was named
after him.
He returned to Europe in 1827, and twice refused the Governor Generalship of
India, preferring to finish his two-volume work, "History of India" (1841). He
died in Surrey on November 20, 1859. What is relevant ot Indology is that
Montstuart Elphinstone was highly skeptical of the later dating of the sacred
110
books which was increasingly being propounded in Europe, and expressed his
confidence that Indic culture was essentially a continuous one from a period of
great antiquity. He was of the opinion that the Indic civilization was to be
regarded as a great civilization. Unfortunately his history of India did not
receive as great a publicity as that of Mill, whichh was clearly a racist account
by today’s standards
75
Horace
Hayman
(1786-1860)
Wilson First Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford U.wrote extensively on the Puranas.
Has been described as ‘the greatest Sanskrit scholar of his time’. He received his
education in London and traveled to India in the East India Companies medical
service. He became the secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal from 1811 to
1833 and published a Sanskrit to English dictionary. He became Boden professor
of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1833 and the director of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1837.
He translated the Visnu Purana, Rg Veda and wrote books such as Lectures on the
Religious and Philosophical Systems of the Hindus. He edited a number of
translations of eastern texts and helped Mill compile his History of India, although
later Wilson criticized Mill’s historiography, stating
“Mill’s view of Hindu religion is full of very serious defects, arising from inveterate
prejudices and imperfect knowledge. Every text, every circumstance, that makes
against the Hindu character, is most assiduously cited, and everything in its favor
as carefully kept out of sight, whilst a total neglect is displayed of the history of
Hindu belief.”7
111
Wilson seemed somewhat of an enigma; on the one hand he proposed that Britain
should restrain herself from forcing Christianity upon the Indians and forcing them
to reject their old traditions. Yet in the same breath he exclaimed:
“From the survey which has been submitted to you, you will perceive that the
practical religion of the Hindus is by no means a concentrated and compact
system, but a heterogeneous compound made up of various and not infrequently
incompatible ingredients, and that to a few ancient fragments it has made large
and unauthorized additions, most of which are of an exceedingly mischievous and
disgraceful nature. It is, however, of little avail yet to attempt to undeceive the
multitude; their superstition is based upon ignorance, and until the foundation is
taken away, the superstructure, however crazy and rotten, will hold together.
Wilson’s view was that Christianity should replace the Vedic culture, and he
believed that full knowledge of Indian traditions would help effect that conversion.
Aware that the Indians would be reluctant to give up their culture and religion,
Wilson
made
the
following
remark:
“The whole tendency of brahminical education is to enforce dependence upon
authority – in the first instance upon the guru, the next upon the books. A learned
brahmana trusts solely to his learning; he never ventures upon independent
thought; he appeals to memory; he quotes texts without measure and in
unquestioning trust. It will be difficult to persuade him that the Vedas are human
and very ordinary writings, that the puranas are modern and unauthentic, or even
that the tantras are not entitled to respect. As long as he opposes authority to
reason, and stifles the workings of conviction by the dicta of a reputed sage, little
impression can be made upon his understanding. Certain it is, therefore, that he
will have recourse to his authorities, and it is therefore important to show that his
112
authorities are worthless.”
Wilson felt hopeful that by inspired, diligent effort the “specious” system of Vedic
thought would be “shown to be fallacious and false by the Ithuriel spear of
Christian truth. He also was ready to award a prize of two hundred pounds “…for
the best refutation of the Hindu religious system.” Wilson also wrote a detailed
method for exploiting the native Vedic psychology by use of a bogus guru-disciple
relationship.
76
Recently Wilson has been accused of invalid scholarship. Natalie P.R. Sirkin has
presented documented evidence, which shows that Wilson was a plagiarist. Most
of his most important works were collected manuscripts of deceased an author
that he published under his own names, as well as works done without research.
Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Stutthof (Sztutowo), in the Kingdom of
Arthur Schopenhauer
Prussia.[1] He was the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna
(February
22,
1788
– Schopenhauer, who were both descendants of wealthy German middle class
September
21,
1860), mercantile families from Danzig, Royal Prussia, (now Gdańsk, Poland).[1]
Schopenhauer's father had strong feelings against any kind of nationalism.
German philosopher
Indeed, the name "Arthur" was selected by his father especially because it was the
same in English, German, and French.[1]
His parents were both from the city, and Johanna was an author as well. After
Danzig was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia during the Second Partition of
Poland, in 1793, the Schopenhauer family moved to Hamburg.[1] In 1805,
Schopenhauer's father died (some speculate he committed suicide), and Johanna
moved to Weimar. Because of a promise to pursue a business career,
Schopenhauer remained in Hamburg. His disgust with this career, however, drove
him away to join his mother in Weimar after only a year. He never got along with
his mother; when the writer Goethe, who was a friend of Johanna Schopenhauer,
113
told her that he thought her son was destined for great things, Johanna objected:
she had never heard there could be two geniuses in a single family.
Schopenhauer studied at the University of Göttingen. There he studied
metaphysics and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who advised him to
concentrate exclusively on Plato and Kant. He was awarded a PhD from the
University of Jena in absentia. In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the
University of Berlin; it was there that his opposition to G. W. F. Hegel began. He
attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher J. G. Fichte and the
theologian Schleiermacher, though Schopenhauer would start to react to the
extreme idealism of Fichte. Schopenhauer daringly scheduled his own lectures at
exactly the same time as his nemesis Hegel, in the hope of attracting students to
come to his own lectures instead of Hegel. However, no students turned up to
Schopenhauer's course of lectures, and subsequently he left, never to teach at a
university again. An essay expressing his resentment towards this and his
negative attitude towards university philosophy was later written with the title On
University Philosophy. In 1831, a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and both
Hegel and Schopenhauer fled; but Hegel returned prematurely, caught the
infection, and died a few days later. Schopenhauer instead moved south, settling
permanently in Frankfurt in 1833, where he remained for the next twenty-seven
years, living alone with a succession of pet poodles named Atma and Butz.
77
114
Charles Whish (1790 ? – In 1835, Charles M Whish published in Vol.3 (pp 509 – 23) of the Transactions of
1870 ?)
the Royal society of Great Britain and Ireland an article with the title “ On the
Hindu Quadrature of the circle…. Whish was an officer of
the east india
Company Civil Service in Madras> He refers in hs article to 4 works, the Tantra
sangraaham, Yukti has, Kasrana Paddhat, and the Sadratna Mala. At that time
they did not make an impact for almost a century when C Rajagopal and his
associates began
publishing their findings from astudy of their manuscripts.
The contributions of medieval Indian mathematicians are now beginning to be
recognized and discussed by authorities in the field of history of mathematics.
According to Charles Whish , the Kerala mathematicians had "laid the foundation
for a complete system of fluxions" and these works were "abound with fluxional
forms and series to be found in no work of foreign countries."
The original article by Charles Whish is reproduced in “A Modern introduction to
ancient Indian Mathematics “ by IS Bhanu Murthy in the appendix of the book
Astronomy
•
•
•
•
A procedure to determine the positions of the Moon every 36 minutes.
Methods to estimate the motions of the planets.
The correct formulation for the equation of the center of the planets.
A true heliocentric model of the solar system.
Linguistics
The Kerala School also contributed much to linguistics:
•
•
The ayurvedic and poetic traditions of Kerala were founded by this school.
The famous poem, Narayaneeyam, was composed by Narayana Bhattathiri.
115
78
Franz Bopp (1791-1867)
Did detailed research leading to postulation of Proto Indo European (PIE)…Was
Max Mullers teacher Pl. .read Max Mullers remarks on the extreme prejudice
towards treating Sanskrit as another Indo-European Language
J. F. Montucla (1798): “The ingenious number-system, which serves as the basis
for modern arithmetic, was used by the Arabs long before it reached Europe. It
would be a mistake, however, to believe that this invention is Arabic. There is a
great deal of evidence, much of it provided by the Arabs themselves that this
arithmetic originated in India .” [Montucla, I, p. 375J
James Prinsep
79
J F Montucla (1798)
80
James Prinsep
(1799-1840), Architect and
orientalist
James Prinsep (20 August 1799 - 22 April 1840) was an Anglo-Indian scholar and
antiquary. In 1819 he was given an appointment in the Calcutta mint, where he
ultimately became assay-master in 1832, succeeding H. H. Wilson, whom he
likewise succeeded as secretary of the Asiatic Society.
During James Prinsep's years in the mint he reformed weights and measures,
introduced a uniform coinage and devised a balance so delicate as to indicate the
three-thousandth part of a grain. Prinsep was indeed a many-sided genius. He was
an excellent architect as well. While at Banaras he completed the mint building
according to his own plan and also built a church. He was on the committee for
municipal improvements and improved the drainage system of the city by
constructing a tunnel.
Apart from architectural work (chiefly at Benares), his leisure was devoted to
Indian inscriptions and numismatics, and he is remembered as the first to
decipher and translate the rock edicts of Asoka from Brahmi. Returning to
England in 1838 in broken health, he died in London in 1840.
He succeeded to the Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society on H. H. Wilson's return
116
to England and started his own journal in 1832: The Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal. Prinsep at once appealed to all those officers who had 'opportunities of
forming collections in the upper provinces' for more coins and inscriptions. He
was endowed with the rare capacity of instilling some of his own enthusiasm and
ardour into others. Prinsep's appeal was enormously successful. He was in no
time flooded with coins and inscriptions - materials which changed the very trend
of the Indian antiquarian researches.
Appropriately for the assay-master of the Calcutta mint, coins always remained
Prinsep's first interest. He interpreted Bactrian and Kusana coins. Also all the
indigenous Indian series, including the punch-marked ones — indeed the term
was coined by Prinsep himself — the series of the autonomous republics, the
Gupta series and so on. It was Prinsep who propounded the theory of the descent
of the Gupta coins from the Kusana prototypes and this discussion also brought
him to the question of the different stages in the technique of coin manufacture in
India. He recognized the three stages represented by the punch-marked, the diestruck and the cast coins.
But the crowning achievement of all his labors over the decade was the
decipherment of the Brahmi script in 1837 and the consequent clearing up of
many of the mysteries of ancient Indian history. This is described in great detail in
Chapter II of Vol I of the History and Cultureof the Indian People (HCIP) , the
general editor of which is RC Majumdar himself. The script is shown in Appendix
A
Thus more than forty years after 1788, Sir William Jones's hope was realised when
Prinsep was able to produce the key to unlock all the remaining secrets of the
Brahmi script. However, it is only fair to remember that much of the Brahmi script
had already been deciphered before the final achievement of Prinsep. Furthermore
117
it is difficult to conceive of a situation where the Brahmi script was unknown to the
small but ever present group of Indian pandits (scholars) who had studied such
matters before his arrival on the scene in India. Prinsep followed clues provided
by others regarding the decipherment of Kharosthi and after some mistaken
readings he was finally able, before his departure, to find the values of nineteen
single letters and one compound of Kharosthi as well. It may also be mentioned
that the idea of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum also goes back to the time of
Prinsep and to his idea.
Prinsep literally worked himself to death. Desperately ill as he became, he had to
leave unexpectedly in the midst of his labors and hence much of his work
remained unfinished. As the new editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal commented: '... collectors in all parts of India were in the habit of
submitting to his inspection whatever they lighted upon as unusual, and sought
his reading and interpretation - but the study and exertions required were too
severe for the climate of India, and the Editor's robust constitution sank at last
under the incessant labour...' Yet before taking leave he had managed to set forth
the main lines of Indian archaeological research for at least the next fifty years.
Prinsep's Ghat, an archway on the bank of the Hooghly River, was erected to his
memory by the citizens of Calcutta.
References
•
•
118
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Biography of Prinsep,James in Banglapedia published by the Asiatic
Society of Bangladesh.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not
have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
James Prinsep
James Prinsep (20 August 1799 - 22 April 1840) was an Anglo-Indian scholar and
antiquary. In 1819 he was given an appointment in the Calcutta mint, where he
ultimately became assay-master in 1832, succeeding H. H. Wilson, whom he
likewise succeeded as secretary of the Asiatic Society.
During James Prinsep's years in the mint he reformed weights and measures,
introduced a uniform coinage and devised a balance so delicate as to indicate the
three-thousandth part of a grain. Prinsep was indeed a many-sided genius. He was
an excellent architect as well. While at Banaras he completed the mint building
according to his own plan and also built a church. He was on the committee for
municipal improvements and improved the drainage system of the city by
constructing a tunnel.
Apart from architectural work (chiefly at Benares), his leisure was devoted to
119
Indian inscriptions and numismatics, and he is remembered as the first to
decipher and translate the rock edicts of Asoka from Brahmi. Returning to
England in 1838 in broken health, he died in London in 1840.
He succeeded to the Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society on H. H. Wilson's return
to England and started his own journal in 1832: The Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal. Prinsep at once appealed to all those officers who had 'opportunities of
forming collections in the upper provinces' for more coins and inscriptions. He
was endowed with the rare capacity of instilling some of his own enthusiasm and
ardour into others. Prinsep's appeal was enormously successful. He was in no
time flooded with coins and inscriptions - materials which changed the very trend
of the Indian antiquarian researches.
Appropriately for the assay-master of the Calcutta mint, coins always remained
Prinsep's first interest. He interpreted Bactrian and Kusana coins. Also all the
indigenous Indian series, including the punch-marked ones — indeed the term
was coined by Prinsep himself — the series of the autonomous republics, the
Gupta series and so on. It was Prinsep who propounded the theory of the descent
of the Gupta coins from the Kusana prototypes and this discussion also brought
him to the question of the different stages in the technique of coin manufacture in
India. He recognized the three stages represented by the punch-marked, the diestruck and the cast coins.
But the crowning achievement of all his labors over the decade was the
decipherment of the Brahmi script in 1837 and the consequent clearing up of
many of the mysteries of ancient Indian history. This is described in great detail in
Chapter II of Vol I of the History and Cultureof the Indian People (HCIP) , the
general editor of which is RC Majumdar himself. The script is shown in Appendix
A
120
Thus more than forty years after 1788, Sir William Jones's hope was realised when
Prinsep was able to produce the key to unlock all the remaining secrets of the
Brahmi script. However, it is only fair to remember that much of the Brahmi script
had already been deciphered before the final achievement of Prinsep. Furthermore
it is difficult to conceive of a situation where the Brahmi script was unknown to the
small but ever present group of Indian pandits (scholars) who had studied such
matters before his arrival on the scene in India. Prinsep followed clues provided
by others regarding the decipherment of Kharosthi and after some mistaken
readings he was finally able, before his departure, to find the values of nineteen
single letters and one compound of Kharosthi as well. It may also be mentioned
that the idea of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum also goes back to the time of
Prinsep and to his idea.
Prinsep literally worked himself to death. Desperately ill as he became, he had to
leave unexpectedly in the midst of his labors and hence much of his work
remained unfinished. As the new editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal commented: '... collectors in all parts of India were in the habit of
submitting to his inspection whatever they lighted upon as unusual, and sought
his reading and interpretation - but the study and exertions required were too
severe for the climate of India, and the Editor's robust constitution sank at last
under the incessant labour...' Yet before taking leave he had managed to set forth
the main lines of Indian archaeological research for at least the next fifty years.
Prinsep's Ghat, an archway on the bank of the Hooghly River, was erected to his
memory by the citizens of Calcutta.
References
121
•
•
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Biography of Prinsep,James in Banglapedia published by the Asiatic
Society of Bangladesh.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not
have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
The Brahmi Script
The alphabet
122
123
81
82
Thomas
Babington decreed English to be the medium of instruction, drafted the Indian Penal
Macaulay (1800-1859)
Code.architect of plan to create a new breed of Indian. It is a testament to the
farsightedness of the British, that Macaulay has in large measure succeeded in
his stated mission
French Orientalist who acquainted Europe with the religious tenets and Old Iranian
Eugene Burnouf
language of the Avesta, the ancient sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism.
born Aug. 12, 1801, Paris,
Burnouf's father, Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775–1844), was a noted classical
France
scholar who translated the works of Tacitus and other ancients. The young
died May 28, 1852, Paris
Burnouf studied at the School of Chartres, the…
Eugène Burnouf (April 8, 1801–May 28, 1852) was a French orientalist.
He was born in Paris. His father, Professor Jean Louis Burnouf (1775-1844), was a
classical scholar of high reputation, and the author, among other works, of an
excellent translation of Tacitus (6 vols., 1827-1833). Eugène Burnouf published in
1826 an Essai sur le Pali ..., written in collaboration with Christian Lassen; and in
the following year Observations grammaticales sur quelques passages de l'essai
sur le Pali.
The next great work he undertook was the deciphering of the Zend manuscripts
brought to France by Anquetil-Duperron. By his labours a knowledge of the Zend
language was first brought into the scientific world of Europe. He caused the
Vendidad Sade, part of one of the books bearing the name of Zoroaster, to be
lithographed with the utmost care from the Zend manuscript in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, and published it in folio parts, 1829-1843.
From 1833 to 1835 he published his Commentaire sur le Yaçna, l'un des livres
liturgiques des Parses; he also published the Sanskrit text and French translation
of the Bhagavata Purana ou histoire poétique de Krichna in three folio volumes
124
(1840-1847). His last works were Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien
(1844), and a translation of Le lotus de la bonne loi (The Lotus Sutra, 1852). He had
been for twenty years a member of the Academie des Inscriptions and professor of
Sanskrit in the Collège de France.
See a notice of Burnouf's works by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, prefixed to the
second edition (1876) of the Introd. à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien; also
Naudet, Notice historique sur MM. Burnouf, père et fils, in Mém. de l'Acad. des
Inscriptions, xx. A list of his valuable contributions to the Journal asiatique and of
his manuscript writings, is given in the appendix to the Choix de lettres d'Eugène
Burnouf (1891).
References
•
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Burnouf"
Categories: Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia
Britannica | 1801 births | 1852 deaths | French Indologists | French orientalists |
Pāli
83
Jean Baptiste Biot, (18031860)
Etudes sur lastronomie indienne et sur lastronomie chinoise microform / par
J.B. Biot.
Dhruv Raina, 'Jean-Baptiste Biot on the History of Indian Astronomy (18301860): The Nation in the Post-Enlightenment Historiography of Science',
125
appearing in Indian Journal of History of Science , 35, 4 2000, 319-346.
84
Colonel Boden in 1811
endowed the Boden Chair of Sanskrit Studies in 1811 with the purpose of
debunking the Vedas.
An interesting personality who championed the cause of Oriental Studies, with
profound
implications for the future of India was a Lt. Col. Boden of the Bombay Native
Infantry who bequeathed his estates of about 25,000 Pounds to the University of
Oxford to enable them to found a Chair of Sanskrit which the University named
after him. In his will dated August 15, 1811, Boden stated most explicitly that the
special object of his munificent bequest was to promote the translation of the
scriptures into Sanskrit, so as "to enable his countrymen to proceed in the
conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion" (Preface to SanskritEnglish Dictionary by Sir Monier-Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit, 1899,
p.ix). It would not be out of place to state that Sir Monier-Williams mentions in this
Preface, "he (Monier-Williams) has made it the chief aim of his professional life to
provide facilities for the translation of our sacred scriptures into Sanskrit". It may
be mentioned that Prof. H.H. Wilson, the eminent Sanskritist and first occupant of
the Boden Chair, wrote a book, "The Religion and Philosophical Systems of the
Hindus." Explaining the reasons for undertaking this work, he said,” These
lectures were written to help candidates for a prize...for a best refutation of the
Hindu Religious System." To think that the man who wrote these words held one
of the most prestigious professorships at Oxford! Monier Monier-Williams, the
second holder of the Boden chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University and whose
Sanskrit-English dictionary is still used, wrote in its preface that "the Boden chair
of Sanskrit was set up by Colonel Boden to promote the translation of Christian
Scriptures into Sanskrit, so as to enable his countrymen to proceed in the
conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion." He told the Missionary
126
Congress held at Oxford on 2 May 1877, "The chief obstacle to the spread of
Christianity in India is that these people are proud of their tradition and religion."
His dictionary, he hoped, would enable the translation of the Bible into Sanskrit
and "when the walls, of the mighty fortress of Brahmanism are encircled,
undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of
Christianity must be signal and complete."
One can begin to see why under this constant barrage of anti-Brahmanism by the
colonial overlord for almost 2 centuries, that many Indics have internalized this
fear and loathing of Brahmanas to such a degree, leading to such grotesque
legislative remedies as the Draconian anti Brahmana quota based affirmative
action programs which are now in place in the country. It becomes increasingly
clear why even conservative groups in countries such as America support such
programs even though they would oppose them vociferously in their own country.
So much for ideological consistency
2.8 Discovery of Saraswathi Sindhu civilization
85
Major General Sir Alexander Sir Alexander Cunningham (23 January 1814–28 November 1893) was an English
archaeologist and army engineer, known as the father of the Archaeological
Cunningham
Survey of India. He was born into a family of distinguished Scottish aristocrats.
(23
January
1814–28
November 1893)
His significant accomplishments and views
In 1834, excavated the stupa at Sarnath.
In 1867, he set up the Archaeological Survey of India as a small organisation. He
located many ancient sites such as Kausambhi, a Buddhist centre and discovered
the Asoka pillar at Kausambhi, the Buddhist site of Takshashila and a large
127
number of Buddhist monuments in northern and central India.
Born in London to the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham, he joined the Bengal
Engineers at the age of 19 and spent the next 28 years in the service of British
Government of India. Soon after arriving in India, a meeting with James Prinsep
sparked his lifelong interest in Indian archaeology and antiquity. Cunningham
retired in 1861, having attained the rank of Major General.
The Archaeological Survey of India was set up following a correspondence
between Cunningham and Charles John Canning, then the viceroy of India.
Cunningham was appointed the first director of the project, which operated from
1861 to 1865. In 1865 the Archaeological Survey was halted. In the year 1867,
Cunningham was knighted. Upon the resumption of the Archaeological Survey in
1870, he returned to the directorship, maintaining his post until 1885.
Cunningham died in London in 1893; today, his collection of rare Indian coins is
displayed in the British Museum.
Cunningham was associated with the excavation of many sites in India, including
Sarnath, Sanchi, and the Mahabodhi Temple.
The Mahabodhi Temple is located in Bodh Gaya, India. [1] The Mahabodhi Temple
was almost completely destroyed by the invading muslim forces. [2] General Ikhtiar
Uddin Muhammad Bin Bakhtiyar Khilji invaded Magadha and destroyed the great
Buddhist shrines at Nalanda. [3] The Buddhism of Magadha suffered a tremendous
decline under Khilji. [4]
Cunningham's work of restoring the Mahabodhi Temple was completed by the
128
pioneer of Buddhist revival in India, Anagarika Dharmapala.
Cunningham believed that writing had been known in India since the earliest
times, and that the earliest alphabet was pictographic. He suggested that the
Brahmi script was derived from a the early pictographic writing.The theory is
evidently capable fo being extended to numerical signs. Cunninghams bold
hypothesis regarding th antiquity of wrriting in India has been more than justified
by the later discoveries of the quasipictographic writing found in the seals of the
Indus Valley
Books written by him include
•
•
•
•
Bhilsa Topes (1854), a history of Buddhism
The Ancient Geography of India (1871)
The Book of Indian Eras (1883)
Coins of Ancient India (1891)
External links
•
Sir Alexander Cunningham at Banglapedia
References
86
Edward Elbridge Salisbury The American Oriental Society, founded in 1842 though the study of Sanskrit itself,
(1814-1901)
did not start in American universities until some years later. The first American
Sanskrit scholar of any repute was Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901) who
taught at Yale (Elihu Yale was himself ultimately connected with India and had
profound respect for Vedic philosophy). Another early Sanskritist, Fitz Edward Hall
129
(1825-1901) was in the Harvard class of 1846 but left college to search for a
runaway brother in-of all places-India, where he continued his studies of Indian
languages and even became tutor and professor of Sanskrit at Banaras. He was
the first American scholar to edit a Sanskrit text-the Vishnu Purana.
One of Salisbury's students at Yale, William Dwight Whitney (1827-1901) went on
to become a distinguished Sanskritist in his own right having studied in Berlin
under such distinguished German scholars as Bopp and Weber. Whitney became
a full professor of Sanskrit language and literature at Yale in 1854, wrote his
classic Sanskrit Grammar (1879) and was the doyen of Indologists of his period.
Whitney was succeeded in the Chair of Sanskrit Studies of Yale by Edward
Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932). Hopkins was an excellent scholar but made his
name principally as an exponent of India's religions. His book The Religions of
India (1895) was for many years one of the principal works on the subject available
in America and his Origins and Evolution of Religion published in 1923, sold well.
With Yale leading the way, Harvard caught up and beginning with James
Bradstreet Greenough (1833-1900), had a succession of great Sanskrit teachers,
the most distinguished among them was Charles Rockwell Lanman who taught for
over forty years, publishing such works as Sanskrit Reader and Beginnings of
Hindu Pantheism. But his greatest contribution was planning and editing of the
Harvard Oriental Series. In his time he was responsible for influencing such
students of his who were later to achieve literary renown as T. S. Eliot, Paul Elmer
More and Irving Babbitt. The tradition of American Indologists has been nobly kept
up by those who followed: to mention only a few names, A.V. William Jackson,
Franklin Edgerton, W. Norman Brown, and Joseph Campbell.
87
130
88
Otto von Bohtlingk,
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(May 30, 1815 - April 1, 1904) Otto von Böhtlingk was a German Indologist and Sanskrit scholar, born in Saint
Petersburg, Russia.
Having studied Oriental languages, particularly Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, at
the university of St. Petersburg, he continued his studies in Germany, first in
Berlin and then (1839-1842) in Bonn. Returning to St Petersburg in 1842, he was
attached to the Royal Academy of Sciences, and was elected an ordinary member
of that society in 1855. In 1860 he was made Russian state councillor, and later
privy councillor with a title of nobility. In 1868 he settled at Jena, and in 1885
removed to Leipzig, where he resided until his death there.
Bohtlingk was one of the most distinguished scholars of the nineteenth century,
and his works are of pre-eminent value in the field of Indian and comparative
philology. His first great work was an edition of Panini's Grammatik
Aṣhṭaadhyaayi, with a German commentary. (Bonn, 1839-1840).
This book Bohtlingk again took up forty-seven years later, when he republished it
with a complete translation under the title Panini's Grammatik mit Übersetzung
(Leipzig, 1887). The earlier edition was followed by:
•
•
•
•
Vopadevas Grammatik (St Petersburg, 1847)
Über die Sprache der Jakuten (St Petersburg, 1851)
Indische Sprache (2nd ed. in 3 parts, St Petersburg, 1870-1873, to which an
index was published by Blau, Leipzig, 1893)
a critical examination and translation of Chandogya-upanishad (St
Petersburg, 1889)
131
•
a translation of Brihad-Aranyaka-upanishad (St. Petersburg, 1889)
In addition to these he published several smaller treatises, notably one on Vedic
accent, Über den Accent im Sanskrit (1843).
But his magnum opus is his great Sanskrit dictionary, Sanskrit-Wörterbuch (7
vols., St Petersburg, 1853-1875; new ed. 7 vols, St Petersburg, 1879-1889), which
with the assistance of his two friends, Rudolf Roth (d. 1895) and Albrecht Weber
(b. 1825), was completed in twenty-three years.
Bibliography
•
•
•
•
•
with Rudolph Roth, Sanskrit-Wörterbuch St. Petersburg 1855-1875.
Sanskrit-Wörterbuch In kürzerer Fassung 1879-1889, repring Buske Verlag,
1998, 2003, ISBN 3-87548-199-2
Panini's Grammatik 1887, reprint 1998 ISBN 3-87548-198-4
Indische Sprüche 3 volumes, St. Petersburg, Akad. d. Wissenschaften, 186365.
Sanskrit-Chrestomathie reprint 1967, ISBN B0000BUGAE
http://www.salagram.net/WesternIndologists-page.htm
“WEBER AND GOLDSTUCKER: Weber and Boehtlingk prepared a dictionary of the
Sanskrit language called the 'Sanskrit Worterbuch. Prof. Kuhn was also one of
their assistants. Being mainly based on the wrong and imaginary principles of
philology, the work is full of wrong meanings in many places and is, therefore,
unreliable and misleading. It is a pity that so much labour was wasted on account
132
of sheer prejudice. Th dictionary was subject of severe criticism by Prof.
Goldstuker which annoyed the two editors. Weber was so much upset that he
stooped to use abusive language of the coarsest kind against Prof. Goldstucker.
He said that the views of Prof. Goldstucker about the Worterbuch showed 'a
perfect derangement of his mental faculties', since he did not reject the authority
of the greatest Hindu scholars freely and easily. Replying to their undignified
attacks Prof. Goldstucker exposed the conspiracy of Professors Roth, Boehtlingk,
Weber and Kahn which they had formed to undermine the greatness of ancient
Bharatvarsha.
He
wrote:
'It will, of course, be my duty to show, at the earliest opportunity, that Dr.
Boehtlingk is incapable of understanding even easy rules of Panini, much less
those of Katyayana and still less is he capable of making use of them in the
understanding of Classical texts. The errors in his department of the Dictionary
are so numerous........ that it will fill every serious Sanskritist with dismay, when he
calculates the mischievous influence which they must exercise on the study of
Sanskrit philology'.
He further remarks: '....that questions which ought to have been decided with the
very utmost circumspection and which could not be decided without very
laborious research have been trifled with in the Worterbuch in the most
unwarranted manner.'
Goldstucker was called upon by one of Boehtlingk's men not only to have respect
for 'the editor of Panini.....'(i.e. Boehtlingk) but even for the hidden reasons for
foisting
on
the
public
his
blunders
of
ever
kind.
We know that there were no other 'hidden reasons' than their Christian bias which
impelled them to suppress the correct information of the Hindu grammarians and
underrate and vilify Aryan civilization and culture, and at the same time to serve as
133
tools of the British Government towards the same end.
Professor Kuhn, who 'gave his opinion on the Worterbuch' was 'an individual
whose sole connection with Sanskrit studies consisted in handling Sanskrit books
to those who could read them, a litery naught, wholly unknown, but assuming the
airs of a quantity, because it had figures before it that prompted it on, a personage
who, according to his own friends, was perfectly ignorant of Sanskrit'.
Provoked by the unwarranted flouting of the authentic Hindu tradition, Professor
Goldstucker was compelled to raise his 'feeble but solitary voice' against the
coterie of mischievous propagandists masquerading under the garb of 'scientific'
scholars. He concludes his laborious work with the following significant remarks:
'When I see that the most distinguished and most learned Hindu scholars and
divines - the most valuable and sometimes the only source of all our knowledge of
ancient India - are scorned in theory, mutilated in print, and, as consequence, set
aside in the interpretation of Vaidik texts; .......when a clique of Sanskritists of this
description vapors about giving us the sense of the Veda as it existed at the
commencement of Hindu antiquity; ......when I consider that those whose words
apparently derive weight and influence from the professional position they hold;
........then I hold that it would be a want of courage and a dereliction of duty, if I did
not make a stand against these Saturnalia of Sanskrit Philology.”
89
Robert Caldwell (1815-1891)
Collected Sanskrit manuscripts, a British missionary
90
Karl Marx,
It is not well known except perhaps in India and in scholarly circles, that Karl Marx
had a keen interest in India and wrote extensively (partly to pay his bills) on the
economics, politics and history of India.. Notwthstanding his immense intellectual
134
Born May 5, 1818
Died March 17 1883
powers, his iconoclastic pedigree and perceptive capabilities, Marx remains a
prisoner of his own prejudices and exhibits the ‘loin cloth syndrome ‘ of his fellow
Indologists in great abundance when writing about India . What, pray is the loin
cloth syndrome. It is the propensity of western observers of the Indian scene to
make superficial judgements based on the most visible characteristics of the
Hindu
135
91
Sir Monier Monier-Williams Second Boden Professor of Sanskrit. Published one of the most famous dictionaries
in the world, namely the Sanskrit English dictionary , which is widely used
(1819-1899)
throughout the world and not surprisingly in India .
Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) studied, documented and taught Asian
languages in England, and compiled one of the most widely-used Sanskrit-English
dictionaries.
Monier-Williams was the son of Colonel Monier Williams, surveyor-general in the
Bombay presidency, and was born at Bombay on 12 November 1819. He was
educated at University College, Oxford from 1837 and taught Asian languages at the
East India Company College from 1844 until 1858, when company rule in India ended
after the mutiny.
Monier-Williams was the second occupant of the Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford
University, following Horace Hayman Wilson, who had started the University's
collection of Sanskrit manuscripts upon taking the Chair in 1831. Indian studies in
England were dominated by the demands of government and Christian evangelism,
in ways that might be considered unacceptable in an academic environment today.
Indeed, Max Müller, the most obvious candidate for the chair, was passed over
because his religious views were deemed too liberal. Monier-Williams declared from
the outset that the conversion of India to the Christian religion should be one of the
aims of orientalist scholarship.
He returned to India in 1875 and collected substantial funds for the proposed Indian
institute at Oxford. When Monier-Williams founded the University's Indian Institute in
1883, it provided both an academic focus and also a training ground for the Indian
Civil Service. The Institute closed on Indian independence in 1947.Monier-Williams
created a Sanskrit-English dictionary that is still in print. It is also now available on
CD-ROM and is the basis of the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon.
136
Monier-Williams has drawn the attention of scholars to the object of the
establishment of that chair in the following words ;"I must draw attention to the fact that I am only the second occupant of the Boden
Chair, and that its Founder, Colonel Boden, stated most explicitly in his will (dated
August 15, 1811 A.D.) that the special object of his munificent bequest was to
promote the translation of Scriptures into Sanskrit; so as to enable his countrymen
to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion."
Prejudiced Sanskrit Professors
92
93
137
94
138
Rudolf Roth(1821-1893)
studied rare manuscripts in Sanskrit. Rudolph Roth, the German indologist, was a
fellow student of Mueller’s. Both Roth and Mueller studied together under the
tutelage of Eugene Burnouf, the eminent French Sanskrit Professor. Roth wrote a
thesis on the Vedic literatures called, Zur Literatur und Geschichte des Veda, and in
1909 he published his edition of Yaska’s Nirukta dictionary. However, Roth’s works
were peppered with German ultra-nationalism and he asserted that by means of the
German science of philology, Vedic mantras could be interpreted much better than
with the help of Nirukta. Roth wrote many other things in this haughty vein. One
such disdainful statement he made was: ‘A qualified European is better off to arrive
at the true meaning of the Rg Veda than a Brahmana’s interpretation.’ Of course, for
European, one should read ‘German’. By today’s standards , Rudolf Roth would be
classed as a rank racist’. In the cognitive dissonance that is exhibited by a large
proportion of the English educated elite of India, they accept that the conclusions of
European indologists may be incorrect, but at the same time are reluctant to admit
that the scholarship of the European indologist in the sanskrit language was far
inferior to the rigorous training that a Brahmana pundit receives during the many
years of a Veda patashala
95
Bhau Daji (1822 -1874)
Manuscripts of Aryabhatiya might not be available in North India for about the last
thousand years, but they continued to exist in South India, particularly in Kerala, and
in modern times some of them had been taken to Europe also. Attempts by some
European scholars to decide the date and contents of the Aryabhatiya failed. It was
then that the Aryabhatiya was 'rediscovered' in 1864 by the famous physician and
indologist of Maharashtra Dr. Bhau Daji (1822-74). He writes : "In a diligent and
expensive search for old and rare Sanskrit, Prakrit, Arabic, and Persian manuscripts,
noiselessly conducted for many years past, I have succeeded in procuring the works
whose authorship is attributed to A" He further states : "To the friendly offices of Mr.
Gundert, a German missionary in India, I am indebted for a copy of this work, from a
MS. in the possession of the Raja of Kerkal, in Malabar. It is here called Dasagitika
Sutra .I have also received from him a copy of the Aryabhatiya."
After a thorough study of the Aryabhatiya, Dr. Bhau Daji wrote a paper on Aryabhata
which was published in 1865 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. It
was in this paper, for the first time, the name of Aryabhata, his date of birth and the
contents of his work were correctly interpreted.
The name of Aryabhata, says Dr. Bhau Daji in his paper, is to be written with one t
only; and a double cannot be introduced without violating the srya metre.
Varahamihira, his commentator Bhattotpala, Brahmagupta, and all those who wrote
commentaries on the Aryabhatiya spell his name as Aryabhata, and not Aryabhatta..
139
It was also Dr. Bhau Daji who, for the first time, correctly recognized that
Aryabhatiya Sutra consists of two parts - the Dasagitika and the Aryastasata. He
correctly guessed that the word Aryastasata stands for one hundred and eight (108)
couplets and not for 800 as was supposed by earlier scholars. He also gave the
correct translation of the stanza relating to Aryabhata's age, and stated with
confidence that 'Aryabhata was born in A.D. 476." (if the stanza is as clear as it is
96
140
Friedrich
Maximilian
Mueller (1823-1900).. Ph.D
in philosophy in 1843.
Studied under franz Bopp at
the
Universityof
Berlin
(1844 to 1846). Went to
England
in
1846
and
migrated to Oxford in 1848.
translated the books of the east. His private views of these books were vastly at
variance with his public pronouncements. See a complete list of his statements and
views in the south asia file . This is the popular view in India, as shown in the official
commemoration of the stamp in his honor
97
Fredrich Max Mueller (1823-1900) was born in Dessau and educated in Leipzig, where
he learned Sanskrit and translated the Hitopadesa of Pandita Visnu Sarma before
coming to England in 1846. Since he was penniless, he was cared for by Baron von
Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador to England who basked in the childishly pleasant
thought of converting the whole world to Christianity. It was in London that Max
Mueller met Macaulay who was still on the look out for his ‘right man’.
Mueller was first commissioned by the East India Company to translate the Rg Veda
into English. The company agreed to pay the young Mueller 4 Shillings for each page
that was ready to print. He later moved to Oxford where he translated a number of
books on Eastern religion. His magnum opus was his series The Sacred Books of
the East, a fifty volume work which he began editing in 1875. It goes without saying
that by the end of his career, Mueller had amassed a comfortable sum of money.
It is ironic that the man who has Bhavans named after him all over India and is
treated with so much veneration there, probably did the most damage to uproot
Vedic culture.
At the time of his death he was venerated by none other than Lokamanya Tilak as
‘Veda-maharishi
Moksha-mula
Bhatta
of
Go-tirtha’
(Oxford).
Although Mueller is on record as extolling India’s ancient wisdom, his letters (printed
in two volumes) tell an entirely different story. Generally personal letters give a true
picture of the writer’s inner mind. We present herein some of Mueller’s many
statements in which his true view on Indian culture is glaringly obvious .
“History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual education
before, in the fullness of time, it could be admitted to the truths of Christianity. All
the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a high truth
could meet with ready acceptance. The ancient religions of the world were but
the
141
milk of nature, which was in due time to be succeeded by the bread of life.... ‘The
religion of Buddha has spread far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, and to our
limited vision, it may seem to have retarded the advent of Christianity among a large
portion of the human race. But in the sight of Him with whom a thousand years are
but as one day, that religion, like the ancient religions of the world, may have but
served to prepare the way of Christ, by helping through its very errors to strengthen
and to deepen the ineradicable yearning of the human heart after the truth of God.”
98
142
99
Albrecht Weber
Albrecht Weber, was an early proponent of the false chronology of India
Born 17 February 1825 in Works
Breslau; died 30 November
1901)
was
a
German
• Weiße Jadschurveda, London 1849-1859 (3 Bde.)
indologist and historian.
• Schwarze Jadschurveda, Leipzig 1871-1872
• Tscharanawyuha. Übersicht über die Schulen der Vedas, Berlin 1855
• Indische Litteraturgeschichte, Berlin 1852 , english translation History of
Indian Literarture
• Indische Skizzen, Berlin 1857
• Indische Streifen, Berlin 1868-1879 (3 vols.)
• Verzeichnis der Berliner Sanskrithandschriften, Berlin 1853 ff.
• Über das Catrunjaya des Mahâtmyam, Leipzig 1858]
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_Weber
This is what Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, the well known Bengali scholar, has
to
say
about
Weber
in
his
Krishnacharita,
4th
chapter:'The celebrated Weber was no doubt a scholar but I am inclined to think that it was
an unfortunate moment for India when he began the study of Sanskrit. The
descendants of the German savages of yesterday could not reconcile themselves to
the ancient history and traditions of India. It was therefore, their earnest effort to
prove that the civilization of India was comparatively of recent origin. They could not
persuade themselves to believe that the Mahabharata was composed centuries
before Christ was born'.
Much is made of the fact that some Indic historians (who are then conveniently
dubbed Nationalistic) seek to extend the antiquity of India based on Puranic history,
beyond what the Europeans would vouchsafe us. The real question is why were the
European indologists so keen to revise the Indic chronology to fit their own
preconceived biases. After all what harm is there in investigating the truth of the
matter, and is that not the avowed aim of the scientific approach as touted in
the
143
west .
100
101
Ebenezer Burgess(1820 ? – Ebenezer Burgess was an American scholar and missionary who studied the ancient
1900 ?)
texts of India . In particular he translated the Surya Siddhanta, the ancient
astronomical text of india whose author remains anonymous
Ebenezer Burgess. "Translation of the Surya-Siddhanta, a text-book of Hindu
Astronomy", Journal of the American Oriental Society 6 (1860): 141–498.
The Surya Siddhanta (A Text Book of Hindu Astronomy)
by Rev. Ebenezer Burgess
Year of Publication : 2000
ISBN : 8120806123
Edition : Reprint
Place : New Delhi
Book Details : 25 cm; lvi, 409p.; Figures; Maps; Tables; Appendices; Index; Notes
Portions of the digitized version are available on the web courtesy of the Google
Book search program
here
144
102
William
Dwight
Whitney (1827-1894)
American Indologist. One of Salisbury's students at Yale, William Dwight Whitney
(1827-1901) went on to become a distinguished Sanskritist in his own right having
studied in Berlin under German scholars as Bopp and Weber. But like Weber became
one of the principal detractors of the notion that anything worthwhile came out of
india especially in the field of Astronomy. Whitney became a full professor of
Sanskrit language and literature at Yale in 1854, wrote his classic Sanskrit Grammar
(1879) and was the doyen of Indologists of his period. Like many who considered
themselvesexpert in Snabskrit, it isdoubtful he ever chanted a single sloka in his life.
American Indologists have generallyl toed the line that Whitney first pursued . One
wonders why in the face of such contempt for a people why these gentlemen
continued to study their heritage. The answer lies in their assumption that Sanskrit
was not atichthonous to the subcontinent but was brought into India by the mythical
indo European or as they were known then by the Aryans.
Whitney was succeeded in the Chair of Sanskrit Studies of Yale by Edward
Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932). Hopkins was an excellent scholar but made his
name principally as an exponent of India's religions. His book The Religions of India
(1895) was for many years one of the principal works on the subject available in
America and his Origins and Evolution of Religion published in 1923, sold well
145
103
Professor Johann Georg
Bühler (July 19, 1837—April
8, 1898) was a scholar of
ancient Indian languages
and law.
Professor Johann Georg Bühler (July 19, 1837—April 8, 1898) was a scholar of
ancient Indian languages and law.
Bühler was born to Rev. Johann G. Bühler in Borstel, Hanover, Germany, attended
high school in Hanover where he mastered Greek and Latin, then university as a
student of theology and philosophy at Göttingen, where he studied classical
philology, Sanskrit, Zend, Persian, Armenian, and Arabic. In 1858 he received his
doctorate in eastern languages and archaeology; his thesis explored the suffix -tês
in Greek grammar. That same year he went to Paris to study Sanskrit manuscripts,
and in 1859 onwards to London where he remained until October 1862. This time was
used mainly for the study of the Vedic manuscripts at the India Office and the
Bodleian Library at Oxford University. While in England, Bühler was first a private
teacher and later (from May 1861) assistant to the Queen's librarian in Windsor
Castle.
In Fall 1862 Bühler was appointed assistant at the Göttingen library; he moved there
in October. While settling in, he received an invitation via Prof. Max Müller to join the
Benares Sanskrit College in India. Before this could be settled, he also received
(again via Prof. Müller) an offer of Professor of Oriental Languages at the
Elphinstone College, Bombay (now Mumbai). Bühler responded immediately and
arrived on February 10, 1863 in Bombay. Noted Sanskrit and legal scholar Kashinath
Trimbak Telang was then a student at the college. In the next year Bühler became a
Fellow of Bombay University and member of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society. He was to remain in India until 1880. During this time he collected a
remarkable number of texts for the Indian government and the libraries of Berlin,
Cambridge University, and Oxford University.
146
In the year 1878 he published his translations of the Paiyalachchhi, the oldest Prakrit
dictionary, with glossary and translation. He also took responsibility for the
translation of the Apastamba, Dharmasutra etc. in Professor Max Müller's
monumental compilation and translation, the Sacred Books of the East, vols. 2, 14,
and 25.
Selected publications
•
•
•
Prakrit dictionary Paiyalacchinamamala ("Beiträge zur kunde der
indogermanischen sprachen", Göttingen 1878)
Erklärung
der
Ashokainschriften
("Zeitschrift
der
deutschen
morgenländischen gesellschaft", 1883-1893)
The roots of the Dhatupatha not found in literature ("Wiener zeitschrift für die
kunde des morgenlandes", 1894)
104
Louis Jacolliot
(1837 – 1890)
Louis Jacolliot (1837 – 1890) was a French barrister then a judge in India and Tahiti
(1865-1869) and after that an author and lecturer. Born in Charolles, he lived several
years in India and other parts of Asia. He wrote extensively on Indian culture,
including the legend of the Nine Unknown Men.
He has been described as a "prolific but unreliable" writer. [1] During his time in India
he collected sanskrit myths, which he popularized later. Among other things, he
claimed that hindu-writings (or unspecified "Sanskrit tablets" ) would tell the story of
a sunken land called Rutas in the Indian Ocean. However, he relocated this lost
continent to the Pacific Ocean and linked it to the Atlantis-myth. Furthermore his
'discovery' of Rutas is somehow similar to the origin of the Mu-Story .
His works were not only quoted in Helena Blavatsky's book Isis Unveiled, he also
influenced her speculations on Lemuria.
Among his works is a translation of the Manu Smriti, which has since been deemed
unreliable by numerous scholars including Ann-Marie Etter.
He died at Saint-Thibault-des-Vignes in 1890.
In 1867 Jacolliot, Chief Judge in Chandranagar, wrote a book called ‘La Bible
dans l’Inde’. Within that book, Jacolliot theorised that all the main philosophies of
the western world originated from India, which he glorified thus –
‘Land of ancient India! Cradle of Humanity. hail! Hail revered motherland whom
centuries of brutal invasions have not yet buried under the dust of oblivion. Hail,
Fatherland of faith, of love, of poetry and of science, may we hail a revival of thy
past
in
our
Western
future.’
Mueller said while reviewing Jacolliot’s book that, ‘The author seems to have
been taken in by the Brahmanas of India.’
147
Publications
La Devadassi (1868)
•
•
•
•
•
•
La bible dans l'Inde (1869)
Les Fils de Dieu (1873)
Christna et le Christ (1874)
Histoire des Vierges. Les peuples et les continents disparus (1874)
La genèse de l'Humanité. Fétichisme, polythéisme, monothéisme (1875)
Le spiritisme dans le monde (1875)
105
148
W Brennand
From concluding
remarks
106
Ramakrishna Gopal
Bhandarkar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, also spelt Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, and
known as R.G. Bhandarkar (), was a scholar, orientalist and social reformer.
July 6, 1837–August
24, 1925
Contents
•
•
•
•
1 Early life
2 Orientalist
3 Reformer
4 External links
Early life
He was born in Malvan in Ratnagiri district of present-day Maharashtra. After his
early schooling in Ratnagiri, he gained admission to Elphinstone College, Bombay.
Like his reformer colleague Mahadev Govind Ranade, Bhandarkar was among the
first graduates from Bombay University in 1862 and completed his Master’s degree
in 1863. He won many awards and scholarships in the course of his brilliant
academic career.
Orientalist
Reformer
While a student, he became, in 1853, a member of the Paramhansa Sabha, a secret
association for the furtherance of liberal ideas. It was secret in order to avoid the
wrath of the powerful and orthodox elements of society. The members of his Sabha
were inspired by the visits of Keshub Chunder Sen in 1864. In 1866, some of the 149
members held a meeting in the house of Atmaram Pandurang that would publicly
pledge itself to certain reforms such as (1) an open denunciation of the caste
system, (2) the introduction of widow remarriage, (3) the encouragement of female
education, and (4) the abolition of child marriage. After repeated deliberations, the
members came to the conclusion that religious reforms were required as a basis for
social reforms. The first prayer meeting was held on 31st March 1867, paving the way
for the formation of the Prarthana Samaj. The efforts were boosted by another visit of
Keshub Chunder Sen and visits of Navina Chandra Rai, founder of Punjab Brahmo
Samaj, and Protap Chunder Mozoomdar.
107
Hans Julius Eggeling (1842- Hans Julius Eggeling (1842-1918) was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of
1918
Edinburgh from 1875 to 1914, second holder of its Regius Chair of Sanskrit, and
Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, London.
Eggeling was translator and editor of the Satapatha Brahmana in 5 volumes of the
monumental Sacred Books of the East series edited by Max Müller, author of the
main article on Sanskrit in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and curator of the
University Library from 1900 to 1913. In August 1914 he left for a vacation in his
native Germany; because of World War I, he was unable to return before his death in
1918. He was also a staunch German nationalist.Catalogued Sanskrit manuscripts in
England. Translated the Satapatha Brahmana
150
108
Jabez T. Sunderland
1842-1936
Jabez Sunderland was well versed in the literature of India and encouraged
borrowing concepts frommmmm the Sanatana Dharma
This American Unitarian minister who was born in England launched the first major
indictment of British imperialism in India. His attack appeared in 1908 in an Atlantic
Monthly magazine article disclosing “The New Nationalistic Movement in India.”
Sunderland declared: “India is a subject land. She is a dependent of Great Britain,
not a colony. Britain’s free colonies are really self-ruling in everything except their
relations with foreign powers. Not so with dependencies like India. They are ruled
absolutely by Great Britain, which is not their “mother” country but their conqueror
and master.”
His book India in Bondage was suppressed in India but hailed in America by Time
magazine.
Jabez Sunderland was the first American to participate in the new Indian National
Congress.
Courtesy
of
Universalist
Archives
the
Unitarian
Association
Sunderland’s two journeys to India encouraged an alliance between the British and
American Unitarian associations and the Brahmo Samaj religious and social reform
Hindu movement in India.
From the Ann Arbor Unitarian Church in Michigan, he led the battle for advanced
nondogmatic theism against non-theism. When he died in Ann Arbor, his memorial
service held at the Community Church of New York celebrated his role in liberating
India and his promotion of liberating religion in North America
151
109
George Thibaut (1848-1914)
George Frederick William Thibaut (March 20, 1848-1914) was an Indologist notable
for his contributions to the understanding of ancient Indian mathematics and
astronomy and for his support of the false chronology of india. The purpose of the
Sanskrit college was not to educate Indians butto provide a steady supply of
individuals who would translate the books into English, so that the English could
gain the knowledge contained within the ancient manuscripts. That is the reason
they had a Occidental as a Principal. Otherwise bringing a Sanskrit teacher to India
is tantamount to bringing sand to the beach
Thibaut was born in Germany, worked briefly in England, and then in 1875 was
appointed Professor at the Government Sanskrit College, India, later Benares
College. Between 1875 and 1878 he published a detailed essay on the Śulba sūtras,
together with a translation of the Baudhāyana Śulba sūtra; he later co-edited and
translated the Pañca siddhāntikā. He also edited and translated the following
volumes in Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East:
Note the interesting transition of the Colonial from chela to guru. Just a short span
of 50 years prior to this the Englishman was learning from the pundits. Within such a
short time span he returns to teach the Indians the language of their ancestors. Such
are the benefits of being a colonial overlord, not the least of which is to dictate to the
Indics who is or is not proficient in their own language.
•
•
•
•
152
•
Vol. 34, The Vedanta-Sutras, vol. 1 of 3, with the commentary of
Sankaracharya, part 1 of 2. Adhyâya I-II (Pâda I-II). (1890)
Vol. 38, The Vedanta-Sutras, vol. 2 of 3, with the commentary of
Sankaracharya, part 1 of 2. Adhyâya II (Pâda III-IV)-IV. (1896)
Vol. 48, The Vedanta-Sutras, vol. 3 of 3, with the commentary of Râmânuja.
(1904)
Pancha Siddhantika of Varähamihira - (1) Edited with Sanskrit Commentary. and Eng. Translated by G. Thibaut and S. Dvivedi, Reprint, Motilal Banarsidas,
1930 (
Criticism of Tilak and Jaconi (Indian Antiquaries vol.xxiv,1895, pp 85-100
Thibaut contributed a number of Sanskrit manuscripts to the Department of Oriental
Collections, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, where they are archived today.
External links
•
Works by George Thibaut at Project Gutenberg
Retrieved in part from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Thibaut"
110
Paul Deussen
January
7,
Oberdreis—July
Kiel
6,
Paul Deussen (IPA: [paʊl doʏsən])) was a German Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar.
He was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer. He was also a friend of Friedrich
1845, Nietzsche and Swami Vivekananda.
1919,
In 1911, Paul Deussen founded the Schopenhauer Society (SchopenhauerGesellschaft). He was the first editor, in 1912, of the scholarly journal Schopenhauer
Yearbook (Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch). Deussen served in this position until his death.
Works
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Vedanta und Platonismus im Lichte der Kantischen Philosophie
Die Philosophie des Mittelalters
Die neuere Philosophie von Descartes bis Schopenhauer
Die Philosophie der Griechen
Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung
der Religionen
Die Elemente der Metaphysik. Nebst einer Vorbetrachtung über das Wesen des
Idealismus.
Das System des Vedanta. Nach den Brahma-Sutra's des Badarayana und dem
Commentare des Cankara über dieselben als ein Compendium der Dogmatik
des Brahmanismus vom Standpunkte des Cankara aus. (1883)
Die Sutra's des Vedanta oder die Cariraka-Mimansa des Badarayana nebst
einem vollständigen Kommentare des Cankara. Aus dem Sanskrit übersetzt.
(1887)
Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (1901)
Erinnerungen an Indien (1904)
Die Philosophie der Bibel (1913)
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Paul Deussen
External links
•
Vivekananda on Paul Deussen
153
111
Vincent Smith(1848-1920),
author of Oxford History of India. Generally regarded as being a tad more
enlightened than the rest his cohorts, but the die had been cast and the Indic was to
be portrayed henceforward with condescension rather than as an equal member of
the family of nations
112
113
114
154
Hermann George
(1850-1937)
Jacobi was one of the first to suggest that the Vedic Hymns were collected around 4500
BCE based on Astronomical observations made by the Vedics
115
Kashinath (or
Trimbak Telang
Kashiram) Kashinath Trimbak Telang
Kashinath Trimbak Telang was an Indian judge and Oriental scholar.
(August
20,
1850
in
Bombay–September 1, 1893 By profession an advocate of the high court, he also took a vigorous share in
in Bombay)
literary, social, municipal and political work, as well as in the affairs of the University
of Bombay, over which he presided as vice-chancellor from 1892 until his death. At
the age of five Telang was sent to the Amarchaud Wadi vernacular school, and in
1859 entered the high school in Bombay which bears the name of Mountstuart
Elphinstone. Here he came under the influence of Narayan Mahadev Purmanand, a
teacher of fine intellect and force of character, afterwards one of Telang's most
intimate friends.
From this school he passed to the Elphinstone College, of which he became a fellow,
and after taking the degree of M.A. and LL.B., decided to follow the example of Bal
Mangesh Wagle, the first Indian admitted by the judges to practise on the original
side of the high court, a position more like the status of a barrister than a vakil or
pleader. He passed the examination and was enrolled in 1872.
His learning and other gifts soon brought him an extensive practice. He had
complete command of the English language, and his intimacy with Sanskrit enabled
him to study and quote the Hindu law-books with an ease not readily attained by
European counsel. Telang, finding his career assured, declined an offer of official
employment. But in 1889 he accepted a seat on the high court bench, where his
judgments are recognized as authoritative, especially on the Hindu law. He was
syndic of the university from 1881, and vice-chancellor from 1892 until his death. In
that year also he was elected president of the local branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society. These two offices had never been held by a native of India before. The
decoration of C.I.E. conferred on him in 1882 was a recognition of his services as a
member of a mixed commission appointed by the government to deal with the
educational system of the whole of India. He was nominated to the local legislative
council in 1884, but declined a similar position on the viceroy's council.
155
Along with P.M. Metha, he was the originator of the Bombay Presidency Association.
When a student he had won the Bhugwandas scholarship in Sanskrit, and in this
language his later studies were profound. His translation of the Bhagavad Gita into
English prose and verse is a standard work, and available in Max Müller's
monumental compilation, the Sacred Books of the East, vol. 8, as the Bhagavadgita
With the Sanatsugâtiya and the Anugitâ (published 1882). He criticized Albrecht
Weber's hypothesis that the story of the Ramayana was influenced by the Homeric
epics. While devoted to the sacred classics of the Hindus, Telang did not neglect his
116
117
156
Frederick Eden
(1852-1897)
Pargiter published ‘Purana texts of the Dynasties of the Kali age”. Generally speaking was
biased according to the racial mores of the times. Propagated the false chronology
of India by first fixing the date of Chandragupta Maurya and then working back to
determine the date of the Mahabharata war
Arthur Anthony McDonnell brought 7000 Sanskrit manuscripts from Kashi to Oxford University
(1854-1930),
118
Herman Oldenberg
Hermann Oldenberg
1854-1920
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Hermann Oldenberg (was a German scholar of Indology, and Professor at Kiel (1898)
and Göttingen (1908).
His 1881 study on Buddha, based on Pāli texts, popularized Buddhism and have
remained continuously in print since their first publication. With T. W. Rhys Davids,
he edited and translated into English three volumes of Vinaya texts, as two volumes
of the Grhyasutras and two volumes of Vedic hymns on his own account, in the
monumental Sacred Books of the East series edited by Max Müller. With his
Prolegomena (1888), Oldenberg laid the groundwork to the philological study of the
Rigveda.
Selected bibliography
•
•
•
•
Hymnen des Rigveda. 1. Teil: Metrische und textgeschichtliche Prolegomena.
Berlin 1888; Wiesbaden 1982, English translation: Delhi, Motilal 2005.
Die Religion des Veda. Berlin 1894; Stuttgart 1917; Stuttgart 1927; Darmstadt
1977
Vedic Hymns, The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 46, ed. Friedrich Max Müller,
Oxford University Press, 1897
Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order 1881 (in English translation 1882)
External link
•
bibliography
This article about a theologian is a stub. You can
157
119
Maurice Bloomfield
interpreted the Vedas
(February 23, 1855 - June
12, 1928)
Maurice Bloomfield
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Maurice Bloomfield, Ph. D., LL.D.) was an American philologist and Sanskrit scholar.
Bloomfield was born in Bielitz, in what was at that time Austrian Silesia (today it is in
Poland). His sister was Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler. He went to the United States in
1867, and ten years later graduated from Furman University, Greenville, South
Carolina. He then studied Sanskrit at Yale, under W. D. Whitney, and at Johns
Hopkins University, to which university he returned as associate professor in 1881
after a stay of two years in Berlin and Leipzig, and soon afterwards was promoted
professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. In 1896 Princeton University
bestowed the LL.D. degree upon him.
His papers in the American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative
linguistics, such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric classes of
words, and many valuable contributions to the interpretation of the Vedas, and he is
best known as a student of the Vedas. He translated, for Max Müller's Sacred Books
of the East, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (1897); contributed to the BuhlerKielhorn Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde the section The
Atharva-Veda and the Gopatha Brahmana (1899); was first to edit the Kauika-Sutra
(1890), and in 1907 published, in the Harvard Oriental series, A Vedic Concordance.
In 1905 he published Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a study in comparative mythology.
The Religion of the Veda appeared in 1908; Life and Stories of the Jarna Savior
Paravanatha and a work on the Rig Veda in 1916.
158
References
•
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain. The article is available here:
[1]
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Bloomfield"
120
Balagangadhar Tilak
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
July 23, 1856 , August 1,
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1920
Balawant Gangadhar Tilak
July 23, 1856 – August 1, 1920
Alternate name:
Place of birth:
Place of death:
Movement:
Major
organizations:
Lokmanya Tilak
Ratnagiri, Maharashtra,
India
Bombay,India
Indian Independence
Movement
Indian National
Congress
Balawant Gaṅgādhar Ṭiḷak (Marāṭhī: बाळ गंगाधर िटळक) (July 23, 1856 - August 1,
1920), was an Indian nationalist, social reformer and freedom fighter who was the
first popular leader of the Indian Independence Movement and is known as "Father
of the Indian unrest." Tilak was one of the first and strongest proponents for Swaraj
(complete independence) in Indian consciousness, and is considered the father of
Hindu nationalism as well. Tilak's famous quote
Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall
“ have it!
”
is well-remembered in India even today and is very popular. Reverently addressed
159as
Lokmanya (meaning "Beloved of the people" or "Revered by the world"), Tilak was a
scholar of Indian history, Sanskrit, Hinduism, mathematics and astronomy.
Early life
He was born in a village called chikhali, near Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, into a middle
class Chitpavan Brahmin family. Tilak had a divisive philosphy. He was among
India's first generation of youth to receive a modern, college education. After
121
160
Sir Mark Aurel Stein (1862- Director general, Archaeological Survey of India
1943)
122
Ale
xan
der
Ha
milt
on
(18
62
–
“In Paris, a British lieutenant was to play a very important role in the focus of
Sanskrit studies in Germany. Lt Alexander Hamilton was employed by the East India
Company and was one of the first twenty-four charter members of the Asiatic
Society. (8) Hamilton, who collated Sanskrit manuscripts at the Bibliotheque
Nationale for a new edition of Wilkins’ translation of the Hitopadesha, was the only
one apart from Wilkins who knew Sanskrit and lived in Europe at the time. “
http://www.eng.vedanta.ru/library/prabuddha_bharata/sanskrit_studies_and_comparative_philology.p
hp
A more detailed account by Thomas Trautmann.
Alexander Hamilton, ,the first Sanskrit professor in Britain at the East India College,
,became the conduit by which the knowledge of Sanskrit passed from Calcutta to
Paris and thence to Germany . Hamilton who had served as an officer in the army of
the East India company, learned Sanskrit in Calcutta and became a founding
member of the Asiatiic Society; in 1790 he petitioned the government to study
Sanskrit. He resigned his commission and returned to Britain in 1790, where he lived
of the proceeds of journalism, writing for the Monthly review for a time. And then for
the Edinborough review, of which he was one of the founders. By the Peace of
Amiens, (25 march 1802)) hotilities netween Britain and Napoleonic France were
suspended , and Hamilton like many Briton took the oportunity to travel to france,
only to become a prisoner of war by the decree of 23 May 1803, when war resumed.
161
123
Count Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian writer of poetry, a wide variety of essays.
He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain Paths, says:
Maurice Maeterlink
(1862-1949)
Nobel
1911
162
Pize
for
literature
"he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of
the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European
conception has ever surpassed."
124
Sergey
Fyodorvich Sergey Fyodorovich Oldenburg (Russian: Серге́й Фёдорович Ольденбу́рг; 26
Oldenburg (1863-1934)
September 1863 near Nerchinsk - 28 February 1934, Leningrad) was a Russian
orientalist who specialized in Buddhist studies. He is remembered as the founder of
Russian Indology and the teacher of Fyodor Shcherbatskoy. He was elected into the
Russian Academy of Sciences in 1900 and served as its permanent Secretary in
1904-29.
Oldenburg's father was of lesser noble background; his grandfather was Full General
in the Imperial Russian Army. In 1909-10 and 1914-15, Oldenburg travelled in Central
Asia, where he discovered a number of hitherto unpublished Sanskrit texts. He
instigated several scientific expeditions to Tibet and Dzungaria, which brought to
light a raft of unique Buddhist manuscripts. In order to publish the newly-found
manuscripts, Oldenburg launched in 1897 an authoritative edition of Buddhist texts,
Bibliotheca buddhica, which continues to this day. Among his other projects was the
Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the
Borderlands of Russia.
Oldenburg was a member of the State Council of Imperial Russia (1912-17) and
served in the Russian Provisional Government as Minister of Education but, unlike
his colleagues from the Constitutional Democratic Party, chose to spent the rest of
his life in Russia. This was based on his acquaintance with Vladimir Lenin, which
went back in history. As a student, Oldenburg joined the Scientific-Literary
Association of Students (a brotherhood sharing liberal and radical ideals), where he
met Lenin's brother Aleksandr Ulyanov. Ulyanov dropped out of the inner circle
when he started to plan an assassination attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander III.
The attempt failed, and following the execution of Ulyanov in 1887, his brother Lenin
visited Oldenburg in St Petersburg in 1891 after his return from a two year trip to
London, Paris and Cambridge.
Although he was briefly apprehended by the Cheka in 1919, Oldenburg was allowed
to run the Academy of Sciences until 1929, when, in connection with the ongoing
Bolshevization of the Academy, he was ousted from his posts. Oldenburg devoted
163
the remainder of his life to administrating the Soviet Institute of Oriental Studies,
whose antecedent (the Asian Museum) had been inaugurated by him in 1919.
References
125
Morris
Winternitz
(Dec wrote History of Indian Literature.
23,1863-January
9,1937),
Born Horn, Austria
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Austrian Orientalist.
He received his earliest education in the gymnasium of his native town, and in 1880
entered the University of Vienna, receiving the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
1886. In 1888 he went to Oxford, where until 1892 he assisted Max Müller in the
preparation of the second edition of the Rig-Veda (4 vols., Oxford, 1890-92), collating
manuscripts and deciding on the adoption of many new readings. Winternitz
remained in Oxford until 1898, acting in various educational capacities, such as
German lecturer to the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women
(1891-98), librarian of the Indian Institute at Oxford (1895), and frequently as
examiner in German and Sanskrit both for the university and for the Indian Civil
Service.
In 1899 he went to Prague as privatdozent for Indology and general ethnology, and in
1902 was appointed to the professorship of Sanskrit (made vacant by the retirement
of Ludwig) and of ethnology in the German University of Prague. The Winternitz
family were friendly with Albert Einstein, when he was in Prague around 1911. (this
explains Einstein’s knowledge of Indic contributions to Mathematics)
164
In addition to valuable contributions on Sanskrit and ethnology to various scientific
journals, Winternitz edited the Apastambiya Gṛihyasutra (Vienna, 1887) and the
Mantrapaṭha, or the Prayer-Book of the Apastambins (part i, Oxford, 1897);
translated Müller's Anthropological Religion and his Theosophy, or Psychological
Religion into German (Leipzig, 1894-95); and published Das Altindische
Hochzeitsrituell (Vienna, 1892), which contains also valuable ethnological material; A
Catalogue of South Indian Manuscripts Belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society of
Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1902); and Geschichte der Indischen Literatur
(part i, Leipzig, 1905).
In a rare moment of candor, he expressed the view that the invading Aryans could
not possibly have composed the vast literature in 200 years (with huge gaps before
and after). But even he was aghast when Schopenahuer expressed his admiration for
the upanishads in superlatives . In 1925 The Professor of Indian Studies at the
German University of Prague, Moriz Winternitz (1863-1937), denounced Schopenhaur
for
his
admiration
of
the
Upanisads
with
the
following
words
-
126
127
Louis
JM de la Vall‚e- Belgian indologist
Poussin Belgian indologist
January 1 1869
165
128
Edward Joseph
(1869-1958)
Thomas Edward J. Thomas was a librarian and author of several books on the history of
Buddhism
.
Works
•
•
•
•
The Life of Buddha: As Legend and History
The History of Buddhist Thought second edition (1951)
Early Buddhist Scriptures
The Song of the Lord: Bhagavadgita (1931)
Was one of the first among the European scholars to espouse the Indic origin of the
Brahmi script. The forerunner of Devanagari and the other scripts of India. The
Brahmi was the first phonetic and syllabic script to be discovered , a capability that
the other indologists were reluctant to grant to the Indics. Even today few scholars
of European origin will admit that the Brahmi script was developed in India, for by so
doing there would be profound consequences for the history of and chronology of
India as well as the oft disputed homeland of the proto Indo european people
presuming of course that we accept the basic premise that they once existed.
It must also be remembered that E J Thomas never did accept the premise or the
chronology associated with the Aryan Invasion Theory
129
166
First Vatican Council (1870)
Hinduism is condemned as in the “five anathemas against pantheism” according to
the Jesuit priest John Hardon in the Church-authorized book, The Catholic
Catechism.
130
Sir Vepa Ramesam (1875- First Indian Chief Justice of Madras High Court, http://vepa.us/dir5/Ramesam3.htm,
1958)Jurist, Mathematician,
Developed and authored book on Andhra Chronology.
founder of Neo Malthusian
society,historian
Developed a system of geometry without utilizing all of Euclids axioms
Born on July 27th, 1875. After taking his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1895, when he
was barely 20, was enrolled as High Court Vakil in 1896. appointed Government
Pleader in 1916 (In India the Attorney representing the state was referred to as a
Pleader, for reasons known only to the Colonial Overlord). He ws appointed Judge
of the high Court by the British Government in 1920 at what was considered a fairly
young age of 45 (for India). He was reputed for his prodigious knowledge of Case
Law and the ability to cite cases from his formidable memory. Acted as Chief
Justice for short periods in 1931, 1933 and 1935. Retired on July 27th 1935 at the age
of 60. He was a keen mathematician who contributed frequently to mathematical
journals. He could quote every theorem of Euclids elements from memory Also a
keen student of Astronomy, forecast Halley’s comet long before it was visible to the
public. Took interest in a vairety of subjects such as Archaeology and History,
Dietetics, population control. He was a founder of the Neo Malthusian society in
what was Madras at that time. Knighted in 1929 as Knight Commander of the British
Empire , the highest honor bestowed by the British to an indian
(picture of Portrait in
Madras High Court taken by
Satvi Vepa his great great
grand daughter in 2007
167
131
Sir John Hubert Marshall
(1876-1958)
10
He was the Director general, Archaeological Survey of India during the period of
discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization and assumed all the credit for the discovery
of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, whereas the real discoveries were made by Rakhal
das Bannerjee (Mohenjo Daro) and Daya Ram Sahni (Harappa). Author of the official
account of the discovery 10.
Sir John Hubert Marshall Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization : Being an Official Account of Archaeological Excavations at
Mohenjo-Daro Carried out by the Government of India Between the Years 1922 and 1927/edited by John Marshall. Reprint. New Delhi,
AES, 2004, 3 volumes, 716 p., plates, line drawings, $198 (set). ISBN 81-206-1180-2.
168
132
Ananda Coomaraswamy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1877 - 1947
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (ஆனந்த குமாரசுவாமி) (22 August 1877–9
September 1947) was foremostly, as he said he would like to be remembered, a
Metaphysician, but he was also a pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art,
especially art history and symbolism, and early interpreter of Indian culture to the
West.
Contents
[hide]
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1 Early life
2 His contributions
3 The Perennial
Philosophy
4 Works of
Coomaraswamy
5 References
6 See also
7 External links
Early life
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (22 August 1877 Colombo - 9 September 1947
Needham, Massachusetts) was the son of the famous Sri Lankan Tamil legislator and
philosopher Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy and his English wife Elizabeth Beeby. He
became a pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art, and a great interpreter
of Indian culture to the West. He was also a tireless campaigner for the regeneration
169
of Hinduism. In 1917, he became the first Keeper of Indian art in the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston. He stressed the spiritual element in Indian art.
Born in Ceylon, educated in his mother’s homeland England, he became one of the
world’s greatest art historians and scholars of traditional iconography. He served as
curator in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts until his death, having been the first
Oriental to make the meaning of oriental art understood in the West. He played an
important role in the collection of Persian Art for the Freer in Washington, D.C. and
the Boston Museum of Fine Art as well.
133
170
Arthur Barriedale
(1879-1944)
Keith published ‘The religion of philosophy of the Hindus cannot be regarded as a reliable
translation, betrays more than the average share of prejudice towards anything
smacking of giving credit to the indics
134
Pandurang Vaman Kane
Pandurang Vaman Kane
(1880-1972)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bharat Ratna 1963
Jump to: navigation, search
Dr. Pandurang Vaman Kane (pronounced Kaa-nay) (Marathi: डॉ. पांडुरं ग वामन काणे)
(1880-1972) was a notable Indologist and Sanskrit scholar. He was born in a
conservative Chitpavan Brahmin family in the Ratnagiri district in Maharashtra, India.
Contents
[hide]
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1 Famous works
2 Recognition
3 Miscellaneous
4 Legacy
5 Works
6 See also
7 References
Famous works
Dr. Kane is famous for his magnum opus in English, History of Dharmasastra
subtitled Ancient and Mediaeval Religions and Civil Law in India. This work
researched the evolution of code of conduct in ancient and mediaeval India by
looking into several texts and manuscripts compiled over the centuries. It was 171
published in five volumes; the 1st volume was published in 1930 and the last, in
1962. It runs to a total of more than 6,500 pages. Dr. Kane used the resources
available at prestigious institutes such as the Asiatic Society of Bombay and
Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, among others. The work is known for its
expanse and depth – ranging across diverse subjects such as the Mahabharat,
Puranas and Kautilya – including references to previously obscure sources. The
richness in the work is attributed to his in-depth knowledge of Sanskrit. His success
is believed to be an outcome of his objective study of the texts instead of deifying
them.
135
Robert Beresford Seymour Director of the Zoological Survey of India. led an expedition in the Indian Ocean area.
Was responsible for founding of the Anthropological survey of India
Sewell
1880-1964
172
136
Daya Ram Sahni (188X ? - )
Rai Bahadur Dava Ram
Sahni, C.I.E., M.A., DirectorGeneral of Archaeology in
India, 1931-35; Director of
Archaeology and Historical
Research, Jaipur State,
Rajputana, 1
Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni conducted the excavation that led to the discovery of
Harappa in the ancient Indus Valley
Harappa was a city in the Indus Valley civilization that flourished around 2,500 B.C.
in the western part of South Asia.
The Indus Valley was home to the largest of the four ancient urban civilizations of
Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. The extent of the size of the Indus valley
civilization is now suspected tobe huge covering a vast area of over 1.6 million
square miles. It was not discovered until the 1920's. Most of its ruins, even its major
cities, remain to be excavated. The ancient Indus Valley script has not been
deciphered. Basic questions about the Indus people who created this highly complex
culture remain unanswered but it is increasingly becoming clear that that the
denizens of the Sarasvati Sindhu River valley civilizations were in fact the
successors to the Vedics and the forerunners to the Andhra Satavahanas .
The Harappans used the same size bricks and standardized weights across a wide
swath of South Asia. There were other highly developed cultures in the area. Some
are thousands of years older. Skeletons testify to a continual intermingling of races.
Harappa was settled before what we call the ancient Indus civilization flourished, and
it remains a living town today.
In fact, there seems to have been another large river which parallel and east of the
Indus in the third and fourth millenium B.C. This was the ancient Ghaggra-Hakra
River or Sarasvati of the Rig Veda. Its lost banks are slowly being laid out by
researchers. Along its bed, archaeologists are discovering a whole new set of
ancient towns and cities.
Ancient Mesopotamian texts speak of trading with at least two seafaring civilizations
- Makkan and Meluha - in the neighborhood of India in the third millennium B.C. This
trade was conducted with real financial sophistication in amounts that could involve
tons of copper. The Mesopotamians speak of Meluha as an aquatic culture, where
173
water and bathing played a central role. One of its most well-known structures is the
Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro. A number of Indus Valley objects have been found
buried with Mesopotamians.
This site tells the story of the ancient Indus Valley through the words and
photographs of the world's leading scholars in the US, Europe, India and Pakistan. It
starts with the re-discovery of Harappa in the early 19th century by the explorer
Charles Masson and later Alexander Burnes, and formally by the archaeologist Sir
Alexander Cunningham in the 1870's. This work led to the the first excavations in the
137
Rakhal Das Bannerjee
Place
of
Birth:
Berhampore,
Murshidabad
First to identify and excavate Mohenjo Daro
Dist.
W.
Bengal,
India
Date of Birth:12 April 1885,
Died:
30
May
1930 Reference
138
174
Indus Valley
Civilization “On the trade route from Lahore to Multan, when Charles Masson first saw the
aka the Sarasvati Sindhu mounds at Harappa in 1826 he hardly realized that the ancient mound contains
Civilization
remains of one of the earliest civilizations of the world. Lt. Alexanader Burns, the
British King's emissary to Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1831 stopped for a while at
Harappa, gazed at the ruins, and went away to Lahore. It was in 1862, that Alexander
Cunningham, the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, during
his excavations, found pottery and seals at Harappa. It was Major Clark who found a
seal with a humpless bull and the engreved letters on it which Cunningham at that
point of time, called foreign to India. Thus, the discovery of this great civilization
began. Actual excavations were started in 1920-22 by Daya Ram Sahni under John
Marshall at Mohenjodaro and by R.D. Banerjee at Harappa. N.G. Majumdar had made
a survey of the Sind region. He explored and excavated many sites in the Indus
Basin. In the succeeding decades after 1922, a large number of sites were
discovered in the Indus Valley. The main centres of this civilization, that were found,
at Mohenjodaro, District Larkana (Sind, Pakistan) and Harappa, District Montgomory
(Panjab, Pakistan). Besides these, Dabarkot, Nokjoshahdinjai, Chanhudaro,
Lohumjodaro, Amri, Pandiwahi, Aliumurad and Ghazi Shah in Pakistan yielded
remains of similar culture. Since many of these sites were located in the Indus Basin,
scholars named this civilization as Indus Valley Citilization. This was due to the fact
that civilization was then limited to the Indus Valley proper.””
139
George Coedes (1886-1969)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
George Coedès (1886-1969)was a 20th century scholar of southeast Asian
archaeology and history. He became director of the National Library of Thailand in
1918, and in 1929 became director of L'École française d'Extrême-Orient, where he
remained until 1946. Thereafter he lived in Paris until he died in 1969. He wrote two
seminal texts in the field, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968, 1975) and
The Making of South East Asia (1966), as well as innumerable articles, in which he
developed the concept of the Indianized kingdom. The issue is not necessarily the
extent of the indian ization, but the antiquity of the Indianization and the longevity of
the resulting dynasties. Western indologists have generally tried to underplay th e
Indian influence on both counts
References
•
•
Higham, Charles (2001). The Civilization of Angkor. Phoenix. ISBN 1842125842.
National Library of Australia. Asia's French Connection : George Coedes and
the Coedes Collection
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Coed%C3%A8s"
175
140
R.C. Majumdar (1888-1980)
R. C. Majumdar was an Indian historian and Vice-Chancellor of Dacca University. He
wrote many important historical works on the history of ancient and medieval India,
including on topics like the Freedom movement of India. He was also an admirer of
Vivekananda and Ramakrishna.
Works
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
An Advanced History of India. London, 1960. ISBN 0-333-90298-X
The History and Culture of the Indian People
Ancient India ISBN 81-208-0436-8
History of the Freedom movement in India ISBN 0-8364-2376-3
Champa ISBN 0-8364-2802-1
Vakataka - Gupta Age Circa 200-550 A.D. ISBN 81-208-0026-5
The History of Bengal ISBN 81-7646-237-3
Main currents of Indian history ISBN 81-207-1654-X
Classical accounts of India
Hindu Colonies in the Far East ISBN 99910-0-001-1
Majumdar, R.C. (1979). India and South-East Asia. I.S.P.Q.S. History and
Archaeology Series Vol. 6. ISBN 81-7018-046-5.
However Majumdar fails to confront the shibboleths surrounding Indic history such
as the assumption of a significant Aryan Immigration as late as the 2nd millennium
BC or the much more pertinent question of an Aryan immigration within the lasr
several millennia during the period of recorded history. For all his scholarship he
was unable to shake hmself loose from the key assumptions that the British foisted
on India. Namely that
there was an Aryan Tourist influx during the 2nd millennium BCE
There are distinct racial classes based on objective scientific criteria called
Dravidian and Aryan.
176
The Brahmi scipt was imported from the semitic peoples such as the Phoenicans.
That the Sindhu Saraswati civilization predates the Vedic culture of India
But it must be remembered that he didnt have the satellite data indicating the
presence of the saraswati paleo channel and the data relating to the drying up of the
Sarasvati river (the river has been mentioned at least 50 times in the Rg ). (This is
still incomplete)
141
Sir S Radhakrishnan
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Telugu:స వ్ే ప ల్ ా ాకృషణ్ ,Tamil:சர்வபள்ளி
(September 5, 1888 – April ராதாகிருஷ்ணன), was a philosopher and statesman.
17, 1975)
One of the foremost scholars of comparative religion and philosophy in his day, he
built a bridge between Eastern and Western thought showing each to be
comprehensible within the terms of the other. He introduced Western idealism into
Indian philosophy and was the first scholar of importance to provide a
comprehensive exegesis of India's religious and philosophical literature to English
speaking peoples. His academic appointments included the King George V Chair of
Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta (1921-?) and Spalding
Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University (1936-1939).
He was the first Vice President of India (1952-1962), and the second President of
India (1962-1967). His birthday is celebrated in India as Teacher's Day in his honour.
Contents
•
•
•
•
•
•
1 Life and career
2 Philosophy
3 Quotation
4 Works
5 References
6 External links
Life and career
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Sarvepalli is his family name, and Radhakrishnan his
given name) was born into a middle class family at Tiruttani, a town in Tamil Nadu,
177
South India, 64 km to the northwest of Madras (now known as Chennai). His mother
tongue was Telugu. His early years were spent in Tiruttani, Tiruvallur and Tirupati.
His primary education was in Gowdie School, Tiruvallur, and higher school
education in P.M.High School, Gajulamandyam, Renigunta. He married
Sivakamuamma in 1904 at age 16 in Vellore. They had five daughters and a son,
Sarvepalli Gopal.[1][2] He graduated with a Master's degree in Arts from the University
of Madras.
In 1921, he was appointed as a philosophy professor to occupy the King George V
142
Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH Arnold J. Toynbee was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise
(April 14, 1889 – October 22, and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world
history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline,
1975)
which examined history from a global perspective.
Toynbee's ideas and approach to history
Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The
Decline of the West. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that
civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle.
Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history
of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified his civilizations according to
cultural rather than national criteria. Thus, the "Western Civilization", comprising all
the nations that have existed in Western Europe since the collapse of the Roman
Empire, was treated as a whole, and distinguished from both the "Orthodox"
civilization of Russia and the Balkans, and from the Greco-Roman civilization that
preceded it.
178
With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of
challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of
extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their
entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians
exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic
inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or
social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by
enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a
civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge,
it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide,
not by murder." For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable
machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore
subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made. If leaders of the civilization
did not appease or shut down the internal proletariat or muster an effective military
or diplomatic defense against potential invading outside forces, it would fall.
He expressed great admiration for Ibn Khaldun and in particular the Muqaddimah,
the preface to Khaldun's own universal history, which notes many systemic biases
that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence.
143
Heinrich
1943)
Zimmer
(1890- Author of Philosophies of India "Indian philosophy was at the heart of Zimmer's
interest in oriental studies, and this volume therefore represents his major
contribution to our understanding of Asia. It is both the most complete and most
intelligent account of this extraordinarily rich and complex philosophical tradition
yet written."
Even the school of Paul Deussen, A.W. Ryder and H. Zimmer, which followed
Schopenhauer in the appreciation of ancient Indian intellect, but which did not work
directly on chronology, could not throw off the burden of these extremely
unscientific, fictitious dates.
(b) ......gave rise to the two interrelated diseases of Western Indologists; firstly the
disease of myth, mythical and mythology, according to which Brahma, Indra, Vishnu,
Parvat, Narada, Kashyapa, Pururavas, Vasishta and a host of other ancient sages
have been declared as mythical. Nobody ever tried to understand their true historical
character apprehending that the dates of Bharatiya history would go to very ancient
periods; and secondly, as a corollary to the above, the disease of 'attribution' and
'ascription', under which the works of these and other sages have been declared to
be written by some very late anonymous persons who are said to have ascribed or
attributed them to those 'mythical' sages.
(c) ......brought to the fore-front, the most fanciful and groundless theory of the
migration of the Aryans into India, according to which the very existence of Manu,
the first Crowned King of Bharat, Egypt etc., Ikshvaku, Manu's glorious son; Bharata
Chakravarti, the glorious son of Shakuntala; Bhagiratha, who changed the course of
the Ganga; Kuru, after whom the sacred sacrificial land is called Kurukshetra:;
Rama, the son of Dasaratha and a number of other kings is being totally denied.
(d) ....was responsible for the altogether wrong translations of Vaidika (Vedic) works,
and misrepresentation of the Vaidika culture.
(e) .....did not allow the acceptance of Sanskrit, as being the mother language 179
of at
least the Indo-European group; as at first very ably propounded by Franz Bopp, and
often mentioned by ancient Indian authors.
144
180
Sir Robert Erie Mortimer Archaeological Survey of India, originated the theory that a nomadic band of
Wheeler(1890-1976),
marauders called Aryans destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization. A discovery of a
few skeletons was all that he needed to make the leap of faith that a major invasion
of the mythical Aryans destroyed the Saraswati Sindhu civilization. It is incredible
to see the extent to which the Europeans would build a hypothesis (in this case the
Aryan invasion) , the only purpose being to deny the Indics a continuous civilization
that extended to an antiquity greater than that of the Greeks and the Babylonians
145
Bhimrao
Ambedkar Ambedkar studies at Heidelberg (as viewed in Germany)
(14.4.1891-1956)
This is a note written by a German indologist which is very interesting.Note the ease
with which he falsifies the record and says Ambedkar studied at Sanskrit at Bonn
when he knew for certain that was not the case.
In recent years, Dr. Ambedkar (1891-1956), a framer of the Indian constitution, has
gained increasing recognition in academic and political circles in Germany. Within
the realm of scholarship at the South Asia Institute, his mediating role in the framing
of the Indian Constitution has been adequately recognized (Kulke, Rothermund 1998:
394) as well as the implementation of constitutional safeguards for the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Conrad 1995: 419) through reservation of seats in
politics, education and administration. His political role, especially the social
movement initiated by him, has been subject to a dissertation in political sciences
(Hurst 2000) as well as part of a more elaborate discourse on the part of Harijans in
social movements in India (Fuchs 1999; 2003). In the fields of German indology and
history of religion, Dr. Ambedkars conversion to Buddhism at the end of his life
caught considerable academic attention. He viewed Buddhism as a theology of
liberation (Gensichen 1995: 197) as well as an original development under the
heading of civil religion (Fuchs 2001: 205). In addition, fieldwork among Mahars in
Maharashtra focused on the social relevance of Dr. Ambedkar’s Navayana Buddhism
(Beltz 2001). Textual studies focused on a comparison of Buddhist sources with Dr.
Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma (Buss 1998;Fiske/Emmrich forthcoming),
projecting Dr. Ambedkar’s view of Buddhism as an effort to reconstruct the world
(Beltz/ Jondhale forthcoming).
Ambedkar studies apart, the concern with dalits has been the focus of a number
of studies in social anthroplogy in the urban (Bellwinkel 1980) as well as the rural
setting (Randeria 1993) setting. The most comprehensive project in this respect was
an interdisciplinary research project, financed by the Volkswagen Foundation and
linked with the Department of Modern Indology, South Asia Institute and the
Department of Sociology, Delhi University. Under the heading of Memory, Violence
181
and the Agency, the topic was the role of dalits as victims and perpetrators in
Bombay and Kanpur (Fuchs forthcoming). This project set an example for the
Memorandum of Understanding between Heidelberg University and Delhi University
in common fieldwork for the exchange of scholars and students.
During my fieldwork among dalits in Kanpur (Bellwinkel-Schempp 1998), I was often
asked to give a speech, which I used to do with the introductory words,
that I was born at Bonn in Germany, the town where Dr. Ambedkar studied Sanskrit. I
had found the reference of a short, three months stay in 1923 in Dhananjay Keer’s
Dr. Ambedkar biography (Keer 1995: 49). My projection of benevolent German
146
V. Gordon Childe
Childe, V Gordon
born April 14, 1892, Sydney, Australian-British archaeologist.
N.S.W., Australia
He taught at the University of Edinburgh (1927–46) and later directed the Institute of
died Oct. 19, 1957, Mount Archaeology at the University of London (1946–56). His study of European
prehistory, especially in The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), sought to
Victoria, N.S.W.
evaluate the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and to examine the
structure and character of ancient cultures of the Western world. His later books
included The Most Ancient Near East (1928) and The Danube in Prehistory (1929). His
approach established a tradition of prehistoric studies. He as one of the few Western
indologists who admitted that the Indic contribution to ciuvilozation was
independent ogf Greece and Babylon
182
147
K Nilakantha Sastri (1892 – K Nilakanta Sastri was Professor of history at the University of Madras. The Journal
1975)
of the Royal Asiatic Society, called the first edition of the book,A History of South
India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar. published in 1955, a very
impressive work
Review:
Barbara
The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol.
doi:10.2307/2941900
15,
No.
3
J.
(May,
1956),
pp.
Harrison
452-455
183
There is still the obsession with Aryan sand Dravidians. The definitive history of
India, shorn of such artifical and concocted diversity and distinctions has yet to be
written.
148
Biraja Sankar Guha
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(August 15, 1894 Shillong- Biraja Sankar Guha was an Indian physical anthropologist, who classified Indian
October 20, 1961 Ghatshila, people into races around the early part of the 20th century.He may have been sincere
in his beliefs about the racial divisions of India, but as we remark later on in this
Bihar)
column, his studies were very convenient for the colonial enterprise and he was
amply rewarded for such a stance
Career
B. S. Guha did his graduation in philosophy from the Scottish Church College and
earned his post-graduate degree (also in philosophy) from the University of Calcutta.
He worked as a research scholar in anthropology in the Government of Bengal in
1917. In 1920, he received the A.M. degree in anthropology from Harvard University,
with distinction, and became the Hemenway Fellow of the University. During 19221924 he worked as a research scholar at the Harvard Museum of Natural History
(Boston), American Museum of Natural History (New York), and the Bureau of
Ethnicity of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.. In 1924, he was awarded a
Ph.D. degree in anthropology from Harvard University, for his thesis on "The Racial
basis of the Caste System in India". In the process he became one of the earliest
recipients of the doctorate in that discipline in the world and certainly, the first Indian
citizen to do so.
In 1927, he joined the anthropological section of the Zoological Survey of India[1].
In 1934, Guha became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
and Ireland, and member of the Permanent Council of the International Congress of
Anthropology. In 1936, he founded the Indian Anthropological Institute in Calcutta
(now Kolkata). In 1938, he became the President of the Anthropology Section of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science.
184
In 1944, he submitted a new proposal for a separate Anthropological Survey of
India[1]. His proposal was supported by Nelson Annandale (the first director of the
newly founded Zoological Survey of India) and Robert Beresford Seymour Sewell
(1880-1964), Annandale's successor. In September 1945, zoology was moved under
the Department of Agriculture, and a separate Anthropological Survey of India was
set up under the Department of Education. The Survey came into being on December
1, 1945 with Guha as in-charge, first as "Officer on Special Duty" and later as
Director (from August 1946-1954).
In 1955, Guha became the Director of Social Education Training Centre in Ranchi.
149
Career and training Art historian of South Asian art. Studied under Joseph
Strzygowski (q.v.) at University of Vienna. Dissertation on early Buddhist sculpture
born 1896 Nikolsburg (now (1919). 1921-50 taught at University of Calcutta. During those years she edited
Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art and published numerous works
Mikulov ), Czech Republic
including magnum opus, The Hindu Temple (1946). She traveled to the U.S. as early
died 1993 Philadelphia , as 1922, but after the assassination of her husband in Pakistan (1950), she moved
there permanently to the United States where she taught at the Institute of Fine Art,
USA
New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of
Art.
Stella Kramrisch
Methodologically, Kramrisch remained close to her mentor, Strzygowski, studying
the object using a metaphysical approach and employing distinctly non-western
concepts in her history writing. While a student, she was influenced by Kandinsky's
art theory and the theosophy of Rudolf Steiner (whom she knew personally). In
India, she converted to Hinduism and amassed a significant collection of South
Asian art objects which she ultimately sold or willed to the Philadelphia Museum of
Art. The major exhibition she mounted at the museum in 1968, "Unknown India"
perhaps best demonstrates her belief that the understanding of both aristocratic and
common art objects were necessary to appreciate a culture's artistic
accomplishment.
Stella Kramrisch was one of the key individuals (along with a few others like Ananda
Coomaraswamy) largely responsible for the widespread awareness of the aesthetics,
beauty and uniqueness of Indian art.
Country: Austria/United States
Biography: New York Times, January 24, 1999, Section 2: 35. Dictionary of Art 18:
437-8; Miller, Barbara Stoler, "Stella Kramrisch: A Biographical Essay," pp 3-34, in
Exploring India's Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch, Barbara Stoler
Miller, ed. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983; Threads of Cotton,
Threads of Brass: Arts of Eastern India and Bangladesh from the Stella Kramrisch
185
Collection. Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition catalog, 1999.
Bibliography: [complete bibliography:] Dye, Joseph M., III, comp. "A Bibliography of
the Writings of Stella Kramrisch." in Exploring India's Sacred Art: Selected Writings
of Stella Kramrisch. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983, pp. 35-48;
[dissertation:] Untersuchungen zum Wesen der frühbuddhistischen Bildnerei
Indiens. Ph. D., University of Vienna, 1919; The Hindu Temple. 2 vols. Calcutta:
University of Calcutta, 1946. (Repr. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976). Presence of
Siva. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; Unknown India: Ritual Art in
150
Louis Renou
Louis Renou
(1896-1966)
Louis Renou (1896-1966) was the pre-eminent French indologist of the 20th century.
In particular, he studied Indian culture and Sanskrit. Only a part of his work has been
translated to English.
Bibliography
•
•
•
•
Religions of Ancient India, (1968), Schocken Books ISBN 0-8052-0179-3
History of Vedic India. New Delhi, Sanjay Prakashan, 2004, xi, 216 p., ISBN 817453-102-5
Hinduism, (1961), George Braziller, ISBN 0-8076-0164-0
A History of Sanskrit Language, (translated by Balbir, Jagbans Kishore) (2003)
ISBN 81-202-029-4
In French
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
186
•
•
•
•
•
L’Inde classique : manuel des études indiennes, with Jean Filliozat, Paris :
Payot, 1947
L’Inde classique : manuel des études indiennes, with Jean Filliozat, vol. II (with
Paul Demiéville, Olivier Lacombe and Pierre Meile), Paris : Imprimerie
Nationale, 1953
Aṣṭādhyāyī La grammaire de Pāṇini Paris : École française d’Extrême-Orient,
1966
L'Inde fondamentale Hermann, Collection Savoir, c1978. ISBN 2-7056-5885-8.
Louis Renou : choix d'études indiennes Paris : École française d'ExtrêmeOrient, 1997. (2 vol.)
Notes sur la version « Paippalada » de l'atharva-veda, Paris: imprimerie
nationale 1964
Sur le genre du Sutra dans la littérature sanskrite, Paris: imprimerie nationale
1963
Littérature sanskrite, A.Maissonneuve 1946
Grammaire et Vedanta, Paris imprimerie nationale 1957
Fragments du Vinaya Sanskrit, Paris: imprimerie nationale 1911
Etudes védiques, Paris: imprimerie nationale 1952
Etudes védiques et paninéennes (2 volumes), Paris: imprimerie nationale
1980-1986
151
OTTO NEUGEBAUER WAS one of the most original and productive scholars of the
history of the exact sciences, perhaps of the history of science, of our age. He began
as a mathematician, turned first to Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics, and then
took up the history of mathematical astronomy, to which he afterward devoted the
greatest part of his attention. In a career of sixty-five years, he to a great extent
May 26, 1899 — February created our understanding of mathematical astronomy from Babylon and Egypt,
19,
1990 through Greco-Roman antiquity, to India, Islam, and Europe of the Middle Ages and
By N. M. Swerdlow
Renaissance. Through his colleagues, students, and many readers, his influence on
the study of the history of the exact sciences remains profound, even definitive.
Otto E. Neugebauer,
Professor of History of
mathematics , Brown
University
Neugebauer was born in Innsbruck, Austria, his father Rudolph Neugebauer a
railroad construction engineer and a collector and scholar of Oriental carpets. His
family soon moved to Graz where his parents died when he was quite young. He
attended the Akademisches Gymnasium, and was far more interested in
mathematics, mechanics, and technical drawing than in the required courses in
Greek and Latin. Because his family was Protestant, he was exempted from
mandatory instruction in religion, which also pleased him.To cut a long story short,
Neugebauer eventually took up a position as Professor of Mathematics at Brown
Unversity where he did the bulk of his research into the exact science sin antiquity.
What interests us about Neugebauer is that he shifted the interest of the world from
its preoccupation with Greece to Babylon. Once he had done so , the notional
stranglehold that ‘all civilization came from Greece’ was broken and it was possible
for people to fathom that there were other areas of the world where there was
scholarship in the ancient world. In fact it was Neugebauer who first proposed that
Babylon may not have been the only source of ideas in the ancient world and that
the mathematics as decribed in the Vedas and the Sulva Sutras which we now know
predates at least the Egyptian and most likely also the Babylonian civilizations , may
have developed independently of the Babylonians . It finally dawned upon him that
the decimal place value system as well as the symbolic respresentation of an
unknown quantity by alphabets, that created the field of algebra as we now know it,
was the reason for the great advantage that the indics had over everybody else in
the
187
world during that period. It may have also occurred to him that the Indic was unique
in the use of the techniques now known as analytic geometry and hence their
approach to proof was quite different from that of the Greeks. All these deductions
are based on the faulty but never exolicitly stated premise that the Indics were
incapable of developing their own script and numerical notation system.The
Babylonians on the other hand used a place value system, a sexagesimal system
based on 60 (The Jovian orbital period is approximately 12 years long and that may
have had something to do with the choice of 60 as the base for the numerical
system). But such a system is far more cumbersome for arithmetic and algebraic
152
153
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Malraux#Bibliography_include
Andre Malraux
((November 3, 1901
November 23, 1976)
–
Malraux was born in Paris. His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced.
He was raised by his mother, Berthe Lamy, and maternal grandmother, Adrienne
Lamy. His father, a stockbroker, committed suicide in 1930.Malraux studied Oriental
languages at the École des Langues Orientales but did not graduate. At the age of 21
he left for Cambodia with his new wife, Clara Goldschmidt, a German Jewish heiress
whom he married in 1921 and divorced in 1946. (They had a daughter, Florence, born
1933, who married the filmmaker Alain Resnais.) In Cambodia he was arrested and
almost imprisoned for trying to smuggle out a bas-relief from the Banteay Srei
temple.He became highly critical of the French colonial authorities in Indochina and
in 1925 helped to organize the Young Annam League; he also founded the
newspaper Indochina in Chains.
On his return to France he published his first novel, The Temptation of the West
(1926). This was followed by The Conquerors (1928), The Royal Way (1930) and
Man's Fate (1933). For the latter, a powerful novel about the defeat of a communist
regime in Shanghai and the choices facing the losers, he won the 1933 Prix Goncourt
of literature. Included in his non-published work is Mayrena, a novel about the
eccentric French adventurer Marie-Charles David de Mayrena, conqueror of the
highlands of Vietnam and first king of the Sedangs.
188
154
Fernand Braudel
(August
24,
1902
November 27, 1985)
– Fernand Braudel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel (August 24, 1902–November 27, 1985) was a French historian. He
revolutionized the 20th century study of his discipline by considering the effects of
such outside disciplines as economics, anthropology, and geography on global
history. He was a prominent member of the Annales School of historiography, who
concentrated on meticulous Biography
He was born in Luméville-en-Ornois, in the département of the Meuse. Not only was
he born there to the peril of his parent's summer vacation, but he also lived with his
paternal Grandmother for a long time. He studied at the elite Paris Institute of
Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po). His father who was a natural
mathematician aided him in his studies. Braudel also studied a lot of Latin and a little
Greek. He loved History and wrote poetry. Braudel wanted to be a doctor but his
father opposed this idea. In 1923 he went to Algeria, then a French colony, to teach
history. Returning to France in 1932, he worked as a high school teacher and met
Lucien Febvre, the co-founder of the influential Annales journal, who was to have a
great influence on his work. With him, he travelled to Brazil in 1935 to "build" the
University of São Paulo, and using his own words "one of the happiest times in my
life", returning together with Febvre in 1937. In 1939, he joined the army but was
captured in 1940 and became a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck in Germany,
where, working from memory, he put together his great work La Méditerranée et le
Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and189
the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II). Part of his motivation for writing the
book, he said, was that, as a "Northerner," he had come to love the Mediterranean.
After the war he worked with Febvre in a new college, founded separately from the
Sorbonne, dedicated to social and economic history.
In 1962 he wrote A History of Civilizations to be the basis for a history course, but its
rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French
ministry of education, which rejected it.
155
190
Joseph
1987)
Campbell
(1904- follows in the tradition of Heinrich Zimmer, albeit he uses the word myth much too
liberally
156
K D Sethna (1904 - )
In 1980 KD Sethna published a landmark in Indian History, titled The problem of Aryan
origins from an Indian point of view. Indians, at least on the eve of the 20th century were
certainly not used to the notion of History as being subject to a certain point of view. They
assumed there was only one version of history which was closest to the truth. Sethna’s
book was one of the first that pointed out how wrong they could be Sethna questioned the
very fundamentals upon which the Aryan invasion theoory was based
He was 76 at that time and 12 years later he updated a second edition of the book. The Indic
needed to be reminded that history is written by the conquerors not as a search for the truth
but to push forward their own ideologies and worldviews. The conqueror does this for many
reasons, not the
last of which is in order to finesse the need to fight a second battle all
over again. It is an understatement to say that KD Sethna has had a remarkable influence
on how Indians perceive their own history
(Redirected from Amal Kiran)
Kaikhosru Dadhaboy (K.D.) Sethna, 26
November 1904) is an Indian poet,
scholar, writer, philosopher, and cultural
critic. He has published more than forty
books. He is also known as Amal Kiran.
Kiran studied at St. Xaviers School and
St. Xaviers College, affiliated to Bombay
University and was one of Sri
Aurobindo's earliest disciples, arriving at
the Ashram in 1927, age twenty-three, to
take up the path of Integral Yoga under
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. He was
named Amal Kiran, or "Clear Ray", by Sri
Aurobindo in 1930. His book of poems
Inmost Beauty was published at 1933.
In 1949 he was a founding editor of the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram journal Mother
India, which he edited for almost fifty
years. He has recently celebrated his
centenary at the Beach Office of the Sri
Aurobindo Society.
Originally, Amal Kiran was born a ParsiZoroastrian but, after meeting with Sri
Aurobindo, embraced Hinduism.
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo
Books:
Life Divine, Synthesis of Yoga, Savitri,
The Mother, Letters, Agenda
Teachings:
•
•
•
•
•
Involution/Involution, Evolution
Integral education, Integral
psychology
Integral yoga, Triple
transformation
Physical, Vital, Mental, Psychic,
Spirit
Overmind, Supermind, Gnostic
being
Important Places:
191
•
Matrimandir
Communities:
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Auroville,
Important Disciples:
Champaklal, N.K.Gupta, Amal Kiran,
Nirodbaran, Pavitra, M.P.Pandit,
157
Paul Thieme (1905 – 2001)
Paul Thieme (1905-2001) was a scholar of Vedic Sanskrit. He received his doctorate
in Indology in 1928 in Göttingen, and habilitated there in 1932. From 1932 to 1935 he
taught German and French at the University of Allahabad. He taught at Breslau from
1936 to 1940, and reveived tenure at Halle in 1941, but in the same year he was
drafted to the German army, where he worked as an interpreter. In 1945, he was
captured by U.S. troops in Württemberg. After his release in 1946, he returned to
Halle, where he remained until 1953, when he moved to Frankfurt for a professorship
in Indo-European studies, against the will of the GDR authorities. From 1954 to 1960
he was in Yale, and from 1960 to his retirement in 1972 in Tübingen as professor for
Religious studies and Indology.
Thieme is considered one of the "last great Indologists", advancing all aspects of the
philology of Sanskrit, with expertise reaching from the Vedas to the Epics and the
Upanishads, Sanskrit poetry and traditional Hindu science (shastra), and Indian
grammarians (Panini and his commentators). Thieme was also a comparative
linguist, studying Iranian and Indo-European languages in general. Thieme was
fluent in Sanskrit, and therefore respected among traditional Indian scholars, and
rendered the inauguration speech at the first World Sanskrit Conference in Delhi in
1971-1972.
Selected bibliography
•
•
•
1929: Das Plusquamperfektum im Veda (Diss. Göttingen 1928).
1935: Panini and the Veda. Studies in the Early History of Linguistic Science in
India. Allahabad
1938: Der Fremdling im Rigveda. Eine Studie über die Bedeutung der Worte
ari, arya, aryaman und aarya, Leipzig.
External link
•
192
http://www.indologie.uni-halle.de/instgesch/th.htm
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Thieme"
158
Jean Filliozat was a French author and Indologist. He studied medicine and was a
physician between 1930 and 1947. He learned Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Tamil. He
Born November 4,1906 , wrote some important works on the history of Indian medicine.
died 1982
Jean Filliozat,
Jean Filliozat started his career as a physician in Opthalmology, which he practiced
between 1930 and 1947 but gravitated eventually to the study of Oriental religions
and medicine.
He earned a dploma in 1934 from the École pratique des hautes etudes with a thesis
where he compared a text in Sanskrit, the Kumâratantra of Râvana, with the parallels
in other languages of India, in Tibetan, Chinese, Cambodian and Arabic. contributed
in 1946 to a PhD thesis “ The classic doctrine of Indian medicine” . His vocation for
scientific research, his medical studies, his taste for the wisdom of the East, have
played a major role in defining the subject of history of Indian medicine
Filliozat could not go to India before 1947. His first years were therefore devoted to
the study of texts. He was attached to the Department of oriental manuscripts of the
National Library between 1936 to 1941, and a Fellow of modern languages of India
(Tamil) at the École National oriental languages births beween 1937 and 1939,
responsible
s'oriente d'abord vers la médecine (ophtalmologie), qu'il pratique de 1930 à 1947
Parallèlement, pendant ces années de formation, de pratique et de recherches
médicales, il s'initie à l'orientalisme. Il apprend le sanskrit, le pâli, le tibétain et le
tamoul, est licencié ès lettres en 1936 avec des certificats d'études indiennes
(1932), d'histoire des religions (1933), d'ethnologie (1936) et un diplôme de l'École
nationale des langues orientales (tamoul, 1935).. Il obtient en 1934 un diplôme de
l'École pratique des hautes études avec une thèse où il compare un texte sanskrit,
193
le Kumâratantra de Râvana, avec des parallèles en d'autres langues de l'Inde, en
tibétain, chinois, cambodgien et arabe. Il soutient en 1946 une thèse de doctorat ès
lettres, La doctrine classique de la médecine indienne. Sa vocation pour la
recherche scientifique, ses études médicales, son goût de l'Orient, l'ont engagé
d'emblée vers l'histoire de la médecine indienne. Mais il ne sera jamais le
spécialiste d'un champ de recherche unique. Sa vocation est universelle et le milieu
des maîtres qui le guident contribue sans doute beaucoup à universaliser son
orientation. S. Lévi l'entraîne vers le domaine dravidien, afin d'éclairer la
159
Alain
Danielou(October
4,1907-January
27,1994)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
La Musique de l'Inde du Nord
Le Temple Hindou - Architecture sacrée ( 'The Hindu Temple; Deification of
Eroticism' in English)
Music and the Power of Sound
Histoire de l'Inde ( "A Brief History of India' in English)
The first unabridged translation of the Kama Sutra
Virtue, Success, Pleasure and Liberation (The Four Aims of Life)
Ragas of North Indian Classical Music
Le chemin du labyrinthe (autobiography
Like most French indologists, Alain Danielou makes up his own mind regarding the
worth and value of the contributions of the ancient Indic civilization . He is all the
more refreshing in his writings because of his special interest in Music. The More I
read of the writing so the French school of Indologists , the more I like.
194
160
Abraham Seidenberg
1916-1988
Professor Emeritus, 1987 University of California, Berkeley
The distinguished mathematician and historian of mathematics Abraham
Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins Seidenberg, who taught at Berkeley for 42 years, died in Milan, Italy, on May 3, 1988.
University 1943
He had been born in Washington, D.C., on June 2, 1916 and received his B.A. degree
at the University of Maryland in 1937 and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1943 before
joining the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley as Instructor in 1945. He became
Professor in 1958 and Professor, Emeritus in 1987. His career included a
Guggenheim Fellowship, Visiting Professorships at Harvard and at the University of
Milan, and numerous invited addresses, including several series of lectures at the
University of Milan, the National University of Mexico, and at the Accademia
Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. At the time of his death, he was in the midst of another
series of lectures at the University of Milan.
Seidenberg's writings, as were his lectures, are noted for their meticulous clarity of
expression. His publications in pure mathematics include some very influential work
in commutative algebra, notably his joint paper with I.S. Cohen that greatly simplified
the existing proofs of the so-called going-up and going-down theorems of ideal
theory, and a recent series of papers on finiteness results and constructive methods
in algebra. His articles on algebraic geometry include a much-quoted one on the
normality of the general hyperplane section of a normal projective variety. His
papers on differential algebra include several on the foundations of differential
algebra, for any number of differentiations and for any field characteristic, on the
11
Picard-Vessiot
of Sciences.
homogeneous
linear
differential equations, and on the soSeidenberg, A The origin of mathematics, Archive
for Historytheory
of Exact
vol. 18,
301-342,
called Lefschetz-Seidenberg principle of differential algebra, an analog of the
Lefschetz principle for algebraic geometry, which says, very roughly, that algebraic
195
geometry of characteristic zero is the same as algebraic geometry over the field of
complex numbers. Another famous result is the Tarski-Seidenberg theorem, to the
effect that there is a decision procedure for algebra over the real number field and
for elementary geometry, first proved by Tarski using complicated logical machinery,
then restated more simply by Seidenberg and given a much simpler mathematical
proof.
Seidenberg was the author of two textbooks aimed largely at undergraduate
161
Ram Swaroop
(1920 - December 26, 1998)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ram Swarup (राम ःवरूप)[1] was an independent Hindu thinker. A prolific author, his
works took a critical stance against Christianity, Islam and Communism. His work
greatly influenced later Indian writers.
Life
He graduated in Economics at Delhi University in 1941. He participated in the Indian
Freedom Movement,[2] and helped Freedom fighters like Aruna Asaf Ali[3]. He started
the Changer's Club in 1944. Its members included L. C. Jain, Raj Krishna, Girilal Jain,
and historian Sita Ram Goel.[4] In 1948-49, he worked for Gandhi's disciple Mira Behn
(Madeleine Slade).[5]
Swarup worked for the DRS, where he wrote a book on the Communist party that
was published under someone else's name.[6] In 1949 he started the Society for the
Defence of Freedom in Asia.[7] The Society published books that were reviewed in
the West, and criticized in the Communist newspapers Izvestia and Pravda.[8] [9] It
closed in 1955.[10] His early book "Gandhism and Communism" from this time had
some influence among American policy makers and Congress men.[11]
In 1982 he founded the non-profit publishing house Voice of India,[12] which
published works by Harsh Narain, A.K. Chatterjee, K.S. Lal, Koenraad Elst, Rajendra
Singh, Sant R.S. Nirala, and Shrikant Talageri among others .[13]
196
American author David Frawley wrote, "While Voice of India had a controversial
reputation, I found nothing irrational, much less extreme about their ideas or
publications... Their criticisms of Islam were on par with the criticisms of the
Catholic Church and of Christianity done by such Western thinkers as Voltaire or
Thomas Jefferson. In fact they went far beyond such mere rational or historical
criticisms of other religions and brought in a profound spiritual and yogic view as
well." [14]
Author
Ram Swarup's book "The Word As Revelation: Names of Gods" was published in
1980 by Sita Ram Goel. The book was received favourably by Girilal Jain, and was
reviewed by Dr. Sisir Kumar Maitra in the Times of India.[15]
162
163
(1921- ) Former Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) from
1968 to 1972. Elected to revert to do research reather than being in an
administrative capacity at the age of 51 . Learned hhis craft
wiking with Mortimer
Born Jhansi 1921 Wheeler at Taxila in 1944. Dug with him at Arikamedu, Harappa, Brahmagiri, and
Completed his graduate other sites. After 1947, carried out excavations at Hastinapur, Kalibangan.... .
Instrumental in establishing the first regular School of Archaeology in New Delhi in
work
1959, under the overall charge of the ASI. He was its first Director, a post that he held
till 1965. In 1968 he became DG of ASI, a post that he held till 1972. After a short spell
at Allahabad University
at Jiwaji University at Gwalior, he joined Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Simla
in 1977 as a fellow, and later became its Director, a post that he held till 1984. He
excavated many famous sites, including Kalibangan and conceived the Ramayana
Project. His publications include, apart from many papers and reports, The Earliest
Civilization of South Asia.
Lal, Braj Basi
197
164
Alexander Basham, 192x ?
India A. L. Basham, regarded as a scholar on ancient India, writes in The Wonder
That Was India:
"Medieval Indian mathematicians, such as Brahmagupta (seventh century), Mahavira
(ninth century), and Bhaskara (twelfth century), made several discoveries which in
Europe were not known until the Renaissance or later. They understood the import
of positive and negative quantities, evolved sound systems of extracting square and
cube roots, and could solve quadratic and certain types of indeterminate
equations." Mahavira's most noteworthy contribution is his treatment of fractions
for the first time and his rule for dividing one fraction by another, which did not
appear in Europe until the 16th century.
B. B. Dutta writes: "The use of symbols-letters of the alphabet to denote unknowns,
and equations are the foundations of the science of algebra. The Hindus were the
first to make systematic use of the letters of the alphabet to denote unknowns. They
were also the first to classify and make a detailed study of equations. Thus they may
be said to have given birth to the modern science of algebra."
The great Indian mathematician Bhaskaracharya (1150 C.E.) produced extensive
treatises on both plane and spherical trigonometry and algebra, and his works
contain remarkable solutions of problems which were not discovered in Europe until
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He preceded Newton by over 500 years in
the
discovery
of
the
principles
of
differential
calculus.
A. L. Basham writes further, "The mathematical implications of zero (sunya) and
infinity, never more than vaguely realized by classical authorities, were fully
understood in medieval India. Earlier mathematicians had taught that X/0 = X, but
Bhaskara proved the contrary. He also established mathematically what had been
recognized in Indian theology at least a millennium earlier: that infinity, however
divided, remains infinite, ‘
198
In the 14th century, Madhava in South India, developed a power series for the arc
tangent function, apparently without the use of calculus, allowing the calculation of
to any number of decimal places (since arc tan 1 = /4). Whether he accomplished this
by inventing a system as good as calculus or without the aid of calculus; either way
it is astonishing. Stanley Wolpert says: " An untutored Kerala mathematician named
Madhava developed his own system of calculus, based on his knowledge of
trigonometry around A.D. 1500, more than a century before either Newton or
Liebnitz.
165
Roger Louis Billard (1922– Roger Billard, the historian of Indian astronomy, was born in Puteaux, in the
2000)
outskirts of Paris, on 29 August 1922. He was the only child of parents who lived
in modest circumstances. As a boy he developed an interest in both astronomy and
Oriental studies, at one time selling his bicycle to buy a Sanskrit dictionary. But his
JHA, xxxii (2001)
Roger Billard, L'astronomie Indienne. Paris: Publications de l'ecole francaise
d'extreme-orient, 1971..
Billard, Roger, “Åryabhata and Indian Astronomy,” 12.2 (1977) 207-24.
References
Rajamriganka
to
these
by
Siddhántashekhara
texts
Bhoja
by
were
made
(1042
CE)
Shripati
(1039
by
Billard
[Billard
CE)
[Billard
in
his
(1971),
(1971),
book
p.
p.
101
101
ShishyadhIivrddhidatantra by Lalla (tenth century CE) [Billard (1971), p. 10]
Laghubháskariyaivivarana by Shankaranâràyana (869 CE) [Billard (1971), p.8]
Bhaskarivabhasya by Govindasvàmin (c. 830 CE) IBillard (1971), p.81
199
166
167
Edwin
Bryant Somewhat more balanced than the rest of the Anglo American cohorts. While
(Ph.D,Columbia,1997)
sympathetic towards the traditions of ancient Indics, does not show sufficient
courage to stand up for his own convictions and to call a spade a spade and that
the Aryan invasion theory is Anaarya and an ignoble effort to rob the native
inhabitannts of the Indian peninsula of their own heritage
Asko Parpola
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search
Asko Parpola is a professor emeritus of Indology and South Asian Studies at the
University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in the Indus script. He is best known
for his theory that the script encodes a Dravidian language.He is brother of the
Akkadian language epigrapher Simo Parpola pdf.httDp://www.helsinki.fi/~aparpola/ ,
http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html
200
168
David E. Pingree
2 January 1933
11 November 2005
While no one will dispute the considerable tenacity, scholarship, and single
mindedness with which he pursued his studies especially of ancient
Indian
astronomy, the approach David Pingree takes to the contributions of the Vedics of
Ancient india to Astronomy is fundamentally flawed by the assumption that he
makes that India borrowed practically everything from the Greeks or the
Babylonians. This is not borne out by any evidence but remains a conjecture. The
late Abraham Seidenberg of the University of California Berkeley, whose credentials
in the field of History of Mathematics are quite well known, was finally convinced that
the Mathematics of the Sulvasutra predated the Greeks by several centuries snd
developed independently of the Babylonians.
Eulogy by Jon McGinnis “On 11 November 2005, at the age of 72, David E. Pingree
passed away. With the passing of this one man, the academic world lost a
philologist, historian, mathematician, anthropologist, intellectual detective, and true
gentleman. Pingree’s interests ranged from the exact sciences, such as mathematics
and astronomy, to the not so exact sciences, such as astrology and divination; they
spanned the lands from India to Europe, and the times of ancient Mesopotamia to the
Renaissance. Because Pingree treated so many areas that spread across such
diverse cultures, languages and times, it is nearly impossible for any single
individual to do justice to his work. The following, then, can only hope to provide a
few of the pieces in the intricate mosaic that was David Pingree’s life.
Pingree was born on 2 January 1933 in New Haven, Connecticut. His family
moved to Massachusetts when he was a teenager, where he attended high school at
Phillips Academy. At an early age he already showed an interest in mathematics and
the classics, and it was while still in high school that he began teaching himself
Sanskrit -- just one of the numerous language he would come to master in order to
pursue his interests. After high school, Pingree attended Harvard University for both
his undergraduate and graduate work. He received his B.S. degree in 1954 and then
went on to complete his PhD in 1960, writing his dissertation, Materials for the Study
of the Transmission of Greek Astrology to India, under Daniel Ingalls and the
renowned historian of ancient mathematics, Otto Neugebauer, with whom Pingree
201
would later work as a colleague at Brown University. In 1958, while still pursing his
graduate degree, Pingree traveled to India to further his study of Sanskrit and while
there studied informally with a modern Indian astrologer at Poona. After completing
his PhD, Pingree remained at Harvard three more years as a member of its Society of
Fellows before moving to the University of Chicago to accept the position of
Research Associate at the Oriental Institute. In 1971, his former advisor, Otto
Neugebauer, successfully recruited Pingree to succeed him in Brown University’s
Department of the History of Mathematics, of which in 1986 Pingree himself became
Chairman and where he remained until his death.
169
170
202
Michael Witzel
171
Wakankar, Vishnu Shridhar
May 4 1919 - 1988
Dr. Wakankar discovered and studied more than 4000 rock caves in India including
the caves at Bhimabetka, pushing the dates of Indian artistic activities back to 40,000
years ago. He also discovered rock shelter paintings in Europe and America. His
major contribution to Indian History and Indic studies is in the recognition of the
identification of the dried up Sarasvati Ghaggar paleo channel as the Sarasvati river
mentrioned in the Rg . On 17th November, the Dr. Wakankar had begun his four
thousand miles long Marathon Yatr€ from Adi Badri… to Somanath tracing the entire
course of the Sarasvati river to draw attention to the significance of this river to
Indian History….
Interview with Wakankar by K. L. Kamat
Sources:
•
Vishnu
Shridhar
Wakankar
by
V.
N.
Misra.
pp.16
(2001).
Pub: Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalana Samiti, 528/C Shaniwar Peth, Pune-411030,
Maharashtra.
• Obituary section - Man and Environment, Vol. 13 (1989).
• Wakankar Shodh Sansthan (Wakankar Indological / Cultural Research Trust)
(http://members.rediff.com/wakankar/)
In another interview he talks about the myth that Vasco da Gama discovered the sea
route to India
Did
Vasco
da
Gama
discover
the
route
to
India?
Another illusion that the British spread was the Vasco da Gama discovered the203
sea
route to India. It is true that Vasco da Gama came to India but if we get to know how
he
came,
then
reality
will
become
clear.
The famous archeologist Padmashri Dr. Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar says, “I had gone
to England for studies. I was told about Vasco da Gama’s diary available in a
museum in which he has described how he came to India.” He writes that when his
ship come near Zanzibar in Africa, he saw a ship three times bigger than the size of
his ship. He took an African interpreter to meet the owner of that ship who was a
Gujarati trader named Chandan who used to bring pine wood and teak from India
172
Shikaripura
Ranganatha Rao
Born 1922
Shikaripur Ranganatha Rao (born 1922) is an Indian archeologist who led teams
credited with the discovery of a number of Harappan sites including the famous port
city of Lothal in Gujarat.
Biography and career
Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao completed his education at Mysore University. He
worked in the Archaeological Department of Baroda State and subsequently served
the Archaeological Survey of India in various capacities. Dr. Rao has led excavations
of many important sites such as Rangpur, Amreli, Bhagatrav, Dwaraka, Hanur,
Aihole, Kaveripattinam and others. One of his most important works were leading the
research and excavations at Lothal, the earliest known port in history and the most
important Indus-era site in India. Dr. Rao was the recipient of Jawaharlal Nehru
Fellowship and a doctorate of literature from Mysore University. Rao had supervised
excavation of several historic sites across the country in the West and South. He
was also associated with conservation of monuments such as Taj Mahal and forts.
Despite officially retiring in 1980, Dr. Rao was requested to work for the ASI Director
General in leading Indian archaeological projects. It was under the initiative of Dr
Rao that the NIO opened a marine archaeology research centre in 1981, under the
stewardship of then director Dr S. Z. Quazim, which grew into a world recognised
body. He was the founder of the Society of Marine Archaeology in India. Rao has
been at the forefront of Indian archaeology for many decades - he was involved in
extensive research into India's ancient and often mythical past, from the sites of the
Indus Valley Civilization to excavations pertaining to the Kurukshetra War.
Indus script decipherment claim
Ancient Lothal as envisaged by the Archaeological Survey of India.
204
Rao (1992))[1] claimed to have deciphered the Indus script. Postulating uniformity of
the script over the full extent of Indus-era civilization, he compared it to West Asian
alphabets, and assigned sound values based on this comparison. His decipherment
results in an "Sanskritic" reading, including the numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta,
happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa, sata (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 100).
While mainstream scholarship is generally in agreement with Rao's approach of
comparison, the details of his decipherment have not been accepted, and the script
is still generally considered undeciphered. John E. Mitchiner, after dismissing some
more fanciful attempts at decipherment, mentions that "a more soundly-based but
still greatly subjective and unconvincing attempt to discern an Indo-European basis
[2]
173
Girilal Jain
(1924 – 1993)
Girilal Jain, Editor, The Times of India
Published: July 26, 1993
Girilal Jain, an influential Indian journalist, died on July 1, 1993 in New Delhi. He was
69.
Mr. Jain, who joined The Times of India in 1950, served as editor in chief from 1978 to
1988. In columns and other writings, he often argued that a weak central government
was a danger to India, and that Mrs. Gandhi was needed to provide authority,
discipline and order. She was Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 until
she was assassinated in 1984.
His support of Mrs. Gandhi was notable during her crackdown on political opponents
from 1975 to 1977, beginning with the arrest of hundreds.
After her death, Mr. Jain continued to call for strong government, writing in 1987 of
the need to renew and strengthen "the institutions of a modern state which we
inherited from the British, and which have become caricatures of the original
models."
Girilal Jain matured into becoming one of the most refreshing voices in Indan
Journalism today. Culminating in his book titled The Hindu Phenomenon. Typical of
his later writings is this piece
His view of the Hindu right wing
205
Mr. Jain, who was born in a rural village 50 miles from New Delhi, received a
bachelor's degree from Delhi University.
He married Sudarshan Jain in 1951; they had a son and three daughters.
174
Samuel Huntington
Born April 18,1927
Samuel Phillips Huntington (born April 18, 1927) is a controversial US political
scientist known for his analysis of the relationship between the military and the civil
government, his investigation of coups d'etat, his thesis (inspired by Polish scientist
Feliks Koneczny) that the central political actors of the 21st century will be
civilizations rather than nation-states and, most recently, for his views on US
immigration. He graduated from Yale and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. As an
advisor to Lyndon Johnson and in an influential 1968 article, he justified heavy
bombardment of the countryside of South Vietnam as a means to drive the peasants
and supporters of the Viet Cong into urban areas. Huntington also served as coauthor on the report, "The Governability of Democracies", that was issued by the
Trilateral Commission in 1976. More recently, he garnered widespread attention for
his analysis of threats posed to the United States by modern-day immigration. He is
a professor at Harvard University. Huntington came to prominence as a scholar in
the 1960s with the publication of Political Order in Changing Societies, a work that
challenged the conventional view of modernization theorists that economic and
social progress would bring about stable democracies in recently decolonized
countries.
The Clash of Civilizations
For more details on this topic, see Clash of Civilizations.
206
In 1993, Huntington ignited a major debate amongst international relations theorists
with the publication in Foreign Affairs of an extremely influential and often-cited
article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" The article contrasted with another
political thesis regarding the core dynamics of post-Cold War geopolitics expressed
by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History. Huntington later expanded the article
into a full-length book, published in 1996 by Simon and Schuster, entitled The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The article and the book
articulated his views that post-Cold War conflict would occur most frequently and
violently along cultural as opposed to ideological lines. He argued that, whilst in the
cold war conflict was most likely to occur between the Western free world and the
Communist Bloc, it was now most likely between the world's major civilizations, of
which he identified eight with a possible ninth: Western, Latin American, Islamic,
Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese, and the possible ninth, African.
Huntington believes that this cultural organization better describes the world than
the classical notion of variegated sovereign states. He surmised that to understand
conflict in our age and in the future, cultural rifts must be understood, and culture
(instead of the state) must be accepted as the locus of war. Thus, he warned that
Western nations may lose their predominance if they fail to recognize the
irreconcilable nature of this brewing tension.
175
Karl Potter (192x ?)
Karl Potter is a professor Emeritus in the department of Philosophy at the University of
Washington and has done extensive commentary on the core texts of the Indic philosophy.
He is the general editor of the The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies which is an ongoing
project to assemble and summarize information on the various systems (darsana) of Indian
philosophy. Initiated forty years ago, the entire series is planned to consist of some 28
volumes: 26 dealing with particular philosophical systems, an introductory Bibliography,
and a concluding Glossary/Index. Karl H. Potter is Professor Emeritus in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Washington. His publications include
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Padarthatattvanirupanam of Raghunatha Siromani. Harvard Yenching
Series 17, Harvard University Press, 1957.
Presuppositions of India's Philosophies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1963; New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India, 1965. Reprinted Wesport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1972; paper 1976.
Guide to Indian Philosophy. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1988.
Bibliography of Indian Philosophy, (ed.), Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies
Vol. I., Parts 1 and 2. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, Third edition, 1995.
Indian Metaphysics and Epistemology: The Tradition of Nyaya-Vaisesika Up To
Gangesa. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies Vol II. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils. Encyclopedia of Indian
Philosophies Vol III. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass and Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981.
Indian Philosophical Analysis Nyãya-Vaisesika from Gangesa to Raghunãtha
Siromani (ed. with Sibajiban Bhattacharyya), Encyclopedia of Indian
Philosophies Vol. VI. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass and Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993.
Abhidharma Buddhism to 150 A.D. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies
Vol. VII. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996.
Buddhist Philosophy from 100 to 350 A.D, (ed. et al), Encyclopedia of Indian
Philosophies Vol. VIII. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999.
207
Each volume in the series contains an Introduction by its Editor(s), followed by summaries
of all the philosophical texts of the system known to exist in Western language translation,
or extant only in editions, or in a few cases available only in manuscript. These summaries
are arranged in the chronological order in which the texts appear to have been written, and
provide a guide to the literature together with a flowing account of the development of
thought through the history of the system being covered. The summaries are solicited from
specialists in the field from throughout the world who have an intimate knowledge of the
texts being summarized.
176
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan needs no introduction to the readers of this essay. He was well
acquainted with the Indic contribution to ancient Astronomy.
Carl Sagan was a distinguished Cornell University astronomer and Pulitzer Prizewinning author. Here he talks about the indic contribution to the cosmology of the
solar system in one of the episodes of his TV series on the Cosmos
"The main reason that we oriented this episode of Cosmos towards
India is because of that wonderful aspect of Hindu cosmology which
first of all gives a time-scale for the Earth and the universe -- a timescale which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology.
We know that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and the
cosmos, or at least its present incarnation, is something like 10 or
20 billion years old. The Hindu tradition has a day and night of
Brahma in this range, somewhere in the region of 8.4 billion years."
Born
November
9,
1934
Brooklyn, New York
December 20, 1996 (aged 62)
Seattle, Washington, USA
Died Seattle, Washington, USA
United States
Astronomy and planetary science
Universities associated with
Cornell
University
Harvard University
University of Chicago
Search
for
Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence
(SETI)
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Voyager
Golden
Record
Pioneer
plaque
Contact
208
Notable prizes
Oersted
Medal
(1990)
NASA
Distinguished
Public
Service
Medal
(twice)
Pulitzer Prize for General NonFiction
(1978)
NAS Public Welfare Medal (1994)
Rating
*****
"As far as I know. It is the only ancient religious tradition on the
Earth which talks about the right time-scale. We want to get across
the concept of the right time-scale, and to show that it is not
unnatural. In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is
for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that billions is
indwelling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very
clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about
billions of years."
"Finally, the many billion year time-scale of Hindu cosmology is not
the entire history of the universe, but just the day and night of
Brahma, and there is the idea of an infinite cycle of births and
deaths and an infinite number of universes, each with its own gods."
177
Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat
Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1936
Vasundhara Filliozat
Author of "Grammaire Sanskrite Panineenne", son of Jean Filliozat, one of the
foremost scholars of Sanskrit in France, Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat is Professor of
Sanskrit in Paris and conducts research mainly in the field of Sanskrit literature,
Alamkarasastra, Vyakarana, Saivagamas, History of Indian art and architecture. His
publications bear inter alia on Panini and Patanjali, Saivagama and Temple
architecture in Karnataka.
Vasundhara Filliozat is a scholar in Indic epigraphy is the author of the well
acclaimed book on Hampi Vijayanagar, and has written another book recently on “Le
Ramayana” in the context of the architectural depictions at Hampi Vijayanagar
Making something out of nothing - Indian mathematics by Pierre Filliozat
UNESCO Courier, Nov, 1993 by Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat
By inventing the zero, India became the birthplace of modern arithmetic
IN India mathematics has not always been linked to writing. The earliest surviving
written document dates from the third century B.C., but India certainly had an
advanced civilization many centuries before that, and scientific knowledge formed
part of it. Most knowledge was transmitted orally. This ancient learning preserved in
human memory makes up the corpus of the great religious texts known as the
Vedas, which incidentally contain evidence of mathematical knowledge. The Vedas
are written in an archaic form of Sanskrit. Like all Indo-European languages, Sanskrit
has decimal numerals and individual names for the nine units, as well as for ten, a
hundred, a thousand and higher powers of ten.The names of the tens are derived
209
from those of the units, somewhat modified and with the addition of a suffix.
Examples are vimcati 20, trimcat 30, catvarimcat 40. The other numerals are formed
from these components. The names for the hundreds, thousands and so on consist
of a unit name followed by cata or sahasra. Dve cate (dual), for example, means 200,
and trinisahasrani (plural), 3,000.
178
Prof K D Abhyankar
(1936 - )
KD Abhyankar has done considerable research into Ancient Indian astronomy in
additon to his regular duties as Professor af astronomy in Osmania university,
Hyderabad. Attached is a list of his publications .
See for biographical paper
http://prints.iiap.res.in/bitstream/2248/1324/1/paper-1.pdf
Or indicstudies.us/Astronomy/Abhyankarbio
I had the privilege of meeting him on April 26 at his flat in Hyderabad. His health was
not robust, but he agreed to see me even though I did not know him personally at
that time. I plan to compile a summary of his work in the near future.
210
179
Nicholas Kazanas (193x -
(Nicholas Kazanas is the director and a teacher of Yoga and Vedanta at the Omilos
Meleton institute, which was founded in 1976. It focuses on Philosophy (Platonism,
Vedanta, Christian and Buddhist ethics). The Institute also offers courses in
Sanskrit, Comparative Mythology and Political Economy.
http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/english/documents/rdp.pdf
“The Harappans were obviously a literate and highly civilized people who
maintained their 1000 year old culture with peaceful means through trade and
perhaps religion rather than conquest and expansion. The area they inhabited was,
according to Rao (1991: 1), ³1.5 million square kilometers² though I suspect it was
much bigger. Then at about 2000 down to 1800, because of ecological and
environmental changes including the alteration of the routes of some rivers and as
a result, the desiccation of the SarasvatI river, they, or many of them, began to
move eastwards to the Gangetic basin while their culture was breaking down. At
about this time, then, enter our illiterate barbarians, the Aryans. Here the Allchins
(Parpola and Witzel) fail to notice the glaring contradiction in their theory: if the
Aryans had acquired the ³material culture and lifestyle² of the Harappans before
they entered into Saptasindhu, then the RV hymns ought to reflect Harappan
elements (urbanization, fixed fire-hearths, bricks, silver, cotton, rice); but it is the
later texts (BrAhmaNas and sUtras) that do so, and not at all the RV hymns.
Anyway, the Aryans take over and after 2 or 3 centuries produce a most astonishing
collection of hymns, to be followed by other collections, various prose works about
cultic rites and codes of social behaviour. Lord Renfrew (ignoring the
archaeological evidence he cites) suggests they came as mounted bands and
formed an élite (1989: 197) presumably with their horses alone since in all else they
were just like the natives. All that the natives left were their ruined brick-built cities
and some seals with inscriptions the nature and use of which is still unknown. In
this Region of the Seven Rivers, then, we have an archaeologically well attested
culture that seems to have no literature at all (other than the briefest inscriptions)
no code of laws, no religious hymns or secular songs, no fables and tales, and then
an illiterate people that is not archaeologically attested yet produces, in quick
211
succession, all the kinds of literature that the previous culture lacked. It is a most
amazing paradox, an astonishing coincidence of space, time and people. All this is,
of course, possible just as it is possible to be struck by lightning in one¹s bed, or to
fall from the 10th floor on the lawn below and live with only a few concussions.
Many wondrous things are possible in life, but the question is do they really
happen? “
In 2001, Kazanas submitted an article arguing against the concept of Indo-Aryan
migration to the JIES. The editor, JP Mallory, elected to forego the normal peer-
180
Frits Staal (1930 ? - )
LIFE & CAREER - FIELDWORK & WRITING
Professor
emeritus, UC “Frits Staal 's life and career have always been eventful.
Berkeley, Department of
South
&
Southeast Now transplanted to a forest in the Chiang Mai hills, his writings and lectures have
asian studies
become more wide-ranging. Creativity thrives on specialization, yet he is convinced
that the distinctions between letters, sciences and other man-made disciplines are
arbitrary. The seeds for these outlandish beliefs were planted during WWII in his
native Amsterdam where he attended The Barlaeus Gymnasium, called after Caspar
van Baerle whose Inaugural Lecture on Logic of 1632 was on Mercator sapiens, "the
learned merchant." That legendary institution taught Biology, Chemistry, Dutch,
English, French, German, Greek, Latin, Mathematics and Physics with optional
Hebrew and Italian, to which Frits added Arabic and where he fell in love with a part
Indonesian student who excelled at gymnastics. At The University of Amsterdam, he
combined Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy with Philosophy, specializing in
Greek Philosophy and Mathematical Logic; and played violin and viola in the
student's orchestra.
Halfway through his graduate studies, a scholarship of the Government of India took
212
him to India for three years of Indian philosophy at the University of Madras, where
he obtained a Ph.D., and at Banaras Hindu University. At Mylapore, he studied
Panini's Sanskrit grammar with a Pandit and in the old city of VaranasÌ, nibbled at
Navya-NyËya logic under the tutelage of another. Indian hobbies included martial
arts, Vedic recitation, chant and ritual. The combination of Panini and Logic opened
181
Andre Wink, Professor of Unlike other Western authors of Indian History, who rarely find anything negative to
Indian History, University of say about the cabal of leftist, communist combine that rules the roost today in
determining what is appropriate and non –appropriate ot th e 850 billion prple in the ,
Wisconsin, Madison
Andre Wink has been forthright about criticizing eminent historians like R C Sharma
for poor scholarship and and indifference to the facts. Here is a quote from
B 193x ?
Sandhya Jains article in the Pioneer
Education: PhD: University of
Leiden 1984; MA: University of
Leiden; BA: University of
Leiden
“Despite grandiose declarations about free debate and scientific rigour, the Marxist
view of history can survive only when presented as revealed truth, like the Koran and
Hadith in madrasas. A look at the critique of “eminent historian” R.S. Sharma’s work,
Indian Feudalism, by Andre Wink, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin,
Madison, would substantiate this argument.
In Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Vol. I), Wink castigates Sharma for
misguiding historians to look for Indian parallels to European feudalism. Sharma
contends that the “absence of finds of gold coins” in the seventh to tenth centuries
proves that the Indian economy was exclusively rural with trade and urbanism
having suffered a distinct decline. Rubbishing this claim, Wink points out that the
“texts refer to the abundant use of coined money and land charters speak of taxes in
gold and there remains evidence of commercial activity on the coasts.” He also
ridicules Sharma’s assertion that land grants to Brahmins amount to political
feudalism. “
Wink concludes that Sharma’s thesis “involves an obstinate attempt to find
‘elements’ which fit a preconceived picture of what should have happened in India
because it happened in Europe (or is alleged to have happened in Europe by Sharma
and his school of historians whose knowledge of European history is rudimentary
and completely outdated)… The methodological underpinnings of Sharma’s work are
in fact so thin that one wonders why, for so long, Sharma’s colleagues have called
his work ‘pioneering.’”
213
If Andre Wink, who is no saffron scholar, holds this opinion about the man
handpicked by then Education Minister Nurul Hasan to head to Indian
Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and fund the now-challenged genre of
historiography, one is within one’s right to question the accuracy and
integrity of other works as well. In the context of the textbook controversy,
the assertion that twenty-three Jain Tirthankaras are fictional is worthy of
contempt. Wink also scorns the work of D. Desai and G.C. Choudhary, as
also K.A. Nizami, who has glorified the Turkish conquest of northern India for
182
N S Rajaram
born 1943 in Mysore, India
Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram (is an author and mathematician. He is notable for his
extensive publications on the archeology and ancient history of India, focussing on
the anomalies inherent ion the revised history of India as as assembled by British
historians. He was one of the first amongst the post independence Indians to break
loose from the contradictory assumptions made by Euriopean historians which
resulted in such absurdities as the harappan civilization and the Vedic civiliation
living side by side with each other One would expect to see copious references But
in reality as the British would tell the narrative neithrer know about the existenced of
the other .
Professional career
Rajaram holds a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Indiana University, and has
published papers on statistics in the 1970s [4][5] and on artificial intelligence [6][7]
and robotics[8] in the 1980’s
Indian history
Rajaram has published on topics related to ancient Indian history and Indian
archeology, alleging Eurocentric bias in mainstream Indology and Sanskrit
scholarship
214
Rajaram takes a refreshingly original approach to the artifically created question of
the origin of the Vedics and exposes the "lack of scientific methodology" that has
gone into the field of Indology. He has criticized the process by which, eurocentric
19th century "Indologists / missionaries" arrived at many of their conclusions.
Rajaram questions how it was possible for 19th century European evangelical
"Indologists / missionaries" to study and develop hypotheses on Indian history,
claiming many of them were "functionally illiterate" in Indian languages, including
even the fundamental classical language, Sanskrit, suggesting that "every available
modern tool from archaeology to computer science" be used to "clearing away the
cobwebs cast by questionable linguistic theories" as he chooses to refer to
mainstream historical linguistics and philology.[2]
But there is more to this story than incompetence. There is a deliberate attempt to
revise and retrofit Indic history to fit the preconceived misconceptions of Christian
fundamentalist dogma . We have narrated the story of how the Colonial overlord set
about systematically to deny india a historical context and to infer that nothing
worthwhile came from the India and subcontinenent . With the Orientalist paradigm
prevailing in western academia, the postulate that the vast contributions of the
worlds store of knowledge made by the Vedics was in fact the work of an influx of
183
Srinivasan Kalyanaraman
Srinivasan Kalyanaraman has been almost single handedly responsible for the rejuvenation
of interest in the Saraswati River and for proposing a solution for the decipherment of the
Saraswati Sindhu/Brahmi scripts. He forms the vanguard of the new historians of India
(under construction)
215
184
Thomas Roger Trautmann Thomas Trautmann
(May 6 1940 - )
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas R. Trautmann is an American historian. He holds a Ph.D. from the University
of London. His studies focus on ancient India and other subjects. One of the
siginificant acts that Thomas Trautmann did was the chronicling of the notion of an
Aryan race in Europe after the discovery of Sanskrit
Works
•
Kautilya and the Arthasastra (1971)
•
Dravidian Kinship (1981)
•
Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (1987)
•
The Library of Lewis Henry Morgan and Mary Elizabeth Morgan (1994) (with
Karl Sanford Kabelac)
•
Aryans and British India (1997) [1]
•
The Aryan Debate in India (2005) New Delhi, Oxford University Press ISBN 019-566908-8
References
•
216
C.A. Bayly: “What language hath joined”, Times Literary Supplement, 8-8-1997.
(Review of Trautmann 1997)
185
S N Balagangadhara
(194x )
Professor S.N.Balagangadhara or Balu as he is popularly known among his students
and admirers, is director of the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap
(Comparative Science of Cultures) in Ghent University, Belgium. He has authored a
book, The Heathen in His Blindness : Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion, on
the nature of religion. His central area of inquiry is to develop a description of the
western culture against the background of the Indian culture.
Prof. Balagangadhara is currently holding the co-chair of the Hinduism Unit at the
217
186
Rajeev Srinivasan (194x)
Rajeev Srinivasan (Hindi: राजीव ौीिनवासन) is a prominent[citation needed] Indian journalist,
blogger and Hindu rights activist. He was educated at Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras and at Stanford Business School and works in software sales and is a
marketing professional [1]. He writes a regular opinion column for Indian web portal
Rediff. He has been featured in Outlook and other magazines.
His writings represent in general a refreshing change from the crabbed style of
western journalists who use overworn cliches to describe the Indian political scene.
The term ‘right and left’ do not adequately capture the range of the Indian political
ideological spectrum. It is a more of a matter as to who can pander the most to the
greatest number of the electorate and still maintain the façade of being a leader.
Some of the Issues
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The rise of Chinese power and influence
Christian missionary activity and conversions
Minority appeasement politics in India
Leftist politics in India
Western bias against and insensitivity towards Indian interests
The Aryan Invasion theory of Hinduism's appearance in India
The general Anti Hindu tone of western journalism
Blogspot, titled "Shadow Warrior". Some of the major blogosphere issues he has
been instrumental in covering include the Californian Hindu textbook controversy
and Shekhar Gupta's "Hindu fanatic bombers" slip-up.
218
He is skeptical about the Treasure ship voyages of the Chinese Ming dynasty into
the Indian Ocean and to Africa under Admiral Zheng He and suspects they were
"concocted to give the impression that the indian ocean rim has been a chinese
hinterland for a long time", and an instance of "inventing 'history' to justify future
colonization" [2]. In general, he exposes what he alleges are nefarious designs of
modern-day Chinese imperialism.
In December 2003, he made an appearance as a guest speaker at the Indian Institute
of Science's Prasthutha forum, speaking on "Rethinking Indian History" [3].
[edit] External links
•
"Shadow Warrior", Srinivasan's blog
187
Huston Smith
Huston Cummings Smith (born May 31, 1919) is among the preeminent religious
studies scholars in the United States. His work, The Religions of Man (later revised
and retitled The World's Religions), is a classic in the field, sold over two million
copies, and is a particularly useful introduction to comparative religion.
May 31 1919
Life
Smith was born in Soochow, China to Methodist missionaries and spent his first 17
years there. He taught at the Universities of Colorado and Denver from 1944–1947,
moving to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for the next ten years, and
then Professor of Philosophy at MIT from 1958–1973. While at MIT he participated in
some of the experiments with entheogens that professor Timothy Leary conducted
at Harvard University. He then moved to Syracuse University where he was Thomas
J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
until his retirement in 1983 and current emeritus status. He now lives in the Berkeley,
CA area where he is Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley.
During his career, Smith not only studied, but practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen
Buddhism, and Sufism for over ten years each. He is a notable autodidact.
As a young man, Smith, of his own volition, after suddenly turning to mysticism, set
out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard. Heard responded to Smith's
letter, invited him to his Trabuco College (later donated as the Ramakrishna
Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him off to meet the legendary
Aldous Huxley. So began Smith's experimentation with meditation, and association
with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the auspices of Swami
Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.
Via the connection with Heard and Huxley, Smith eventually experimented with
Timothy Leary and others at the Center for Personality Research, of which Leary was
219in
Research Professor. The experience and history of the era are captured somewhat
Smith's book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. In this period, Smith joined in on
the Harvard Project as well, an attempt to raise spiritual awareness through
entheogenic plants.
He developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated by Rene Guenon
and Ananda Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing thread in all his
writings.
In 1996, Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS special to Smith's life and work, "The
188
B G Siddharth
Mahabharata-1300 bce in Afghanistan?
Research by Dr. B.G. Siddharth, Directior of the BM Birla Science Center shows that
the events of the Mahabharata war could have occurred about 1350 BCE in the
region of 35 degrees latitude stretching from Turkey to the Indus Valley. Pitamaha
Siddhanta, a text on astronomical principles, gives this date which is corroborated
by the ancient Jyotish Vedanga, one of the world's oldest astronomical texts.
Siddharth said the total solar eclipse mentioned in the Mahabharata occurred on
June 24, 1311 bce, putting the location of the war in present-day Afghanistan, not far
from Kabul. Grammarian Panini lived in Afghanistan and linguisitic evidence shows
a Sanskritic base ranging from Turkey to the present-day Pakistan. Another piece of
220
189
Srikant Talageri
Talageri is one of the true original philosopher historians of modern India who shot
into prominence with 2 books that changed the nature of the discourse on the
History of Asia and indeed the world. His first book titled ‘The Aryan Invasion
Theory a reappraisal’ was a landmark among the small list of really original books
written about ancient India. It effectively challenged many prevailing myths about
ancient Indic History, in particular the postulate that a mythical race of barbarians
who called themselves Aryans much like the Norsemen who descended upon most
of Europe, proceeded to invade India.. He followed up with another book on the
linguistic , historical analysis of the Rg Veda, which came to some major
conclusions about the history of the various mandalas of the Rg. These conclusions
make it untenable to support the Aryan Invasion Theory, and its core belief in a
migration into indi aas late as 1300 BCE
The debate about the true history of India has now taken on a much more
comprehensive canvas involving the contributions of the ancient Indics on various
topics such as mathematics and Astronomy . These works of Talageri sparked a
paradigm shift in the study of the history of the Indic civilization.
Talageri has been singled out for special scorn and derision by the current
generation of Indologists such as Michael Witzel and Lars Martin Fosse
221
190
Wendy (O’Flaherty )Doniger
“Wendy Doniger, (formerly Wendy O’Flaherty) who wrote the article on Hinduism in
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, is a RISA scholar, and undoubtedly the most
powerful person in academic Hinduism Studies today. She is a former President of
the AAR, now teaches Religious Studies at the University of Chicago, chairs many
academic and powerful bodies, has two Ph.D.s (from Harvard and Oxford) and is a
prolific author. She was also a past President of the very influential Association of
Asian Studies. The most important leverage she has is that she has given more
students (affectionately called Wendy’s children) their Ph.Ds in Hinduism than any
other person in the world and has successfully placed these former students in highleverage academic jobs throughout the Western world, to carry the torch of her
theories and principles of researching Hinduism. There is no place one can go to in
this academic discipline without running into the effect of her influence, through her
large cult of students, who glorify her in exchange for her mentorship. An
introduction on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website had once
described her as follows: “Professor Wendy Doniger is known for being rude, crude
and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works
have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts…”
Quote from
222
191
Arvind Sharma
Arvind Sharma was born in Varanasi, India. He earned a B.A. in History, Economics,
and Sanskrit from Allahabad University in 1958 and continued his interests in
economics at Syracuse University, earning an M.A. in 1970. Pursuing a life-long
interest in comparative religion, Dr. Sharma gained an M.T.S. in 1974 and then a
Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University in 1978. He was the first
Infinity Foundation Visiting Professor of Indic Studies at Harvard University and
succeeded Wilfred Cantwell Smith to the Birks Chair of Comparative Religion at
McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has published over fifty books and five
hundred articles in the fields of comparative religion, Hinduism, Indian philosophy
and ethics, and the role of women in religion. Often cited as an authority on
Hinduism, amongst his most noteworthy publications are The Hindu Gita: Ancient
and Classical Interpretations of the Bhagavadgita (1986), The Experiential Dimension
of Advaita Vedanta (1993), Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by
Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition (1994), and The Study of Hinduism (2003).
Arvind Sharma is the author of the upcoming World Wisdom book, A Guide to Hindu
Spirituality. He also wrote the foreword to the anthology The Essential Ananda K.
Coomaraswamy, edited by Rama P. Coomaraswamy .
223
192
Rosane Rocher (194x ? )
Education
1955-1965 University of
Brussels, Belgium
1965 Ph.D. in Indian
linguistics (awarded prize
for best dissertation in the
humanities)
1961 Licence in Indo-Iranian
studies
1959 Licence in classical
studies
224
Professor of South Asia Studies Rosane Rocher at he Univerrsity of Pennsylvania
has published several books and many articles on Indian and Indian American
studies, East-West intellectual encounter, the history of Indian studies and
linguistics, Sanskrit linguistics, and 18th-century studies. In addition to a biography
of Indologist and polymath Henry Thomas Colebrook, for which she has received a
Weiler Fellowship, her current work includes an edition and translation of an 18thcentury Sanskrit lawbook, a study of language instruction at the East India
Company's College in the early 19th century, and research on 18th-century Bengali
Pandits in British employ.
193
Koenrad Elst (195x –
Dr. Koenraad Elst was born in Leuven, Belgium, on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish
(i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family. He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese
Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven. During a stay
at the Benares Hindu University, he discovered India�s communal problem and
wrote his first book about the budding Ayodhya conflict. While establishing himself
as a columnist for a number of Belgian and Indian papers, he frequently returned to
India to study various aspects of its ethno-religio-political configuration and
interview Hindu and other leaders and thinkers. His research on the ideological
development of Hindu revivalism earned him his Ph.D. in Leuven in 1998. He has
also published about multiculturalism, language policy issues, ancient Chinese
history and philosophy, comparative religion, and the all pervasive but tiresome
Aryan invasion debate.
225
194
Subhash Kak
March 26 1947 –
Subhash Kak (Hindi: सुभाष काक Urdu: ‫ ﺳﺒﻬﺎش ﮐﺎﮎ‬Subhāṣ Kāk) (born March 26, 1947 in
Srinagar, Kashmir) is an Indian American computer scientist and is a Delaune
distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering. He holds a joint professorship in
the department of Asian studies at Louisiana State university
When it comes to Subhash Kak and a host of other Indics, many of whom are
mentioned in this monograph , the occidental world is unanimous in painting him
and the rest as a Hindu nationalist, although his main field of endeavor is that of a
engineering Professor. Typical of the indictment against Kak (and others) is the
essay by Lars Martin Fosse12. It is not clear what Fosse’s credentials are when he
lectures Indic scholars on their inability to grasp their own history, but he pulls out
all the rhetorical flourishes and stops.
For example when an indic expounds on his thesis it is usually termed a polemic.
One of the complaints that Fosse has against Srikant Talageri’s brilliant exposition
on the Rg is that it had only 40 odd references at the end of the book. If that were the
sole criterion for valuation of a paper surely many a classic such as Galileo’s
Dialogue concerning 2 new sciences should rank as a completely useless work
because it has no references.
No paper of this type is without the obligatory reference to the caste of the authors
among those who oppose them. So well informed are these authors like Fosse that
they have figured out that most of the opposition to their half baked theories come
from the Brahmin caste. This is indeed very amusing and ironic. The indian
Brahmana (the correct spelling of the Sanskrit word, the name stems from the fact
that a Brahmana is anyone who is in the pursuit of or has realized Brahman, the
ultimate reality) has been targeted deliberately by every invader and colonial power
12
Lars Martin Fosse “Aryans Past and Post colonial present;the polemics and politics of indigenous Aryanism, Ch 12 of “The Indo
for the very simple reason that it is easy to capture the rest of the population, once
the intellectual head has been decapitated (this is of course changing as we speak
226
as a greater proportion of the population is now more well informed, but I suspect
even so , it is universally true that the intellectual class is going to remain less
abundant than other classes in almost every society.It is therefore quite amusing to
see his clumsy attempt to isolate the Brahmana from the rest of the indic
population. Furthermore a fair proportion of academia both in the US and in india
have a Brahmanical origin, which is not a big surprise to anybody considering that
the Brahmanas are by definiton academic in their pursuits. Since it requires a
degree of scholarship and interest in academic matters, it follows therefore that the
opposition to Western Indology is coming mostly from Brahmanas. The implication
of the Indologists is that the Brahmana is especially motivated to trash the Aryan
195
M D Srinivas
196
K V Sarma
No matter which way we slice it, the contribution that MD Srinivas has made to the
understanding of the Indic Mathematical tradition is both profound as well as
enlightening. He writes in such charming and elegant style that the subject come
alive and we feel we a wtnessng the unfolding of great breathroughs which is indeed
the case. His manuscrpt on “The Indian tradition in Science and technology is a
short but very complete overview. His essay on “Proofs in Indian Mathematics”(in )
is a highly original philosophical work which lays to rest the oft heard complaint by
Occidentals that Indian mathematicians of yore were deficient in proofs.Generally to
be classed as an original thinker
Uncovered significant new details of the contribution of Kerala Astronomers. Has
done an outstanding job pf Cataloging the vast manuscript wealth of India in the
exact science
Books
History of the Kerala School of Indian Astronomy in perspective, Visveshwaranand
institute, Hoshiarpur, 1972
197
C K Raju
Aryan Controversy” a compilation by Edwin Bryant and Laurie L Patton, Routledge, London and New York
227
198
Georges Ifrah
Georges Ifrah has done a lot of research on the origin of the
number systems in the world and has shared his knowledge
in a beautiful book titled the The Universal History of
Numbers , There is a very large section devoted to India and
in addition a very complete Glossary of Indic and related
terms. Ifrah is quite convinced (if there was need of
convincing ) that the decimal place value system as
presently used in the world originated in india.
French historian of Mathematics and author of the book,
The Universal History of Numbers
"The Indian mind has always had for calculations and the
handling of numbers an extraordinary inclination, ease and power, such as no
other civilization in history ever possessed to the same degree. So much so that
Indian culture regarded the science of numbers as the noblest of its arts...A
thousand years ahead of Europeans, Indian savants knew that the zero and
infinity were mutually inverse notions."
(source: Histoire Universelle des Chiffres - By Georges Ifrah Paris - Robert
Laffont, 1994, volume 2. p. 3 ).
Claiming India to be the true birthplace of our numerals, Ifrah salutes the Indian
researchers saying that the "...real inventors of this fundamental discovery, which
is no less important than such feats as the mastery of fire, the development of
agriculture, or the invention of the wheel, writing or the steam engine, were the
mathematicians and astronomers of the Indian civilization: scholars who, unlike
the Greeks, were concerned with practical applications and who were motivated
by a kind of passion for both numbers and numerical calculations."
228
He refers to 24 evidences from scriptures from India, whose dates range from
1150 BC until 458 BC. Of particular interest is the work by Indian mathematician
Bhaskaracharya referred to as Bhaskara II (1150 BC) where he makes a reference
to zero and the place-value system were invented by the god Brahma. In other
words, these notions were so well established in Indian thought and tradition that
at this time they were considered to have always been used by humans, and thus
to have constituted a "revelation" of the divinities.
"It was only after the eighth century BC, and doubtless due to the influence of the
Indian Buddhist missionaries, that Chinese mathematicians introduced the use of
zero in the form of a little circle or dot (signs that originated in India),...".
199
Rajiv Malhotra
229
200
Nicholas Dirks is the Franz Boas Profressor of History and Anthropology at
Columbia University, dean of the university's faculty, and Vice President of its Arts
Dean of the
faculty, and Sciences division. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian
history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule.
Columbia University
Nicholas Dirks (1951 ? - )
Vice President of the Arts His most famous works include The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian
Kingdom (1987), Castes of Mind (2001), and Scandal of Empire (2006). In these works
and Sciences
Dirks has advanced research on how the character of British rule shaped the Indian
subcontinent to come, as well as how Britain's development came to be influenced
by its colonies. In fact Dirks is scathing of the many shibboleths surrounding the
Colonial era.
One such shibboleth is the widely cultivated notion that the Caste system
associated with India today is an artifact of its core religious belief and tradition.
Dirks demolishes this with a devastating indictment of British colonial rule in his
books. In Castes of Minds he writes “caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival
of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a
basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of
a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does
not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination
caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's
diverse forms of social identity and organization.
In , The Scandal of Empire,India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
230
Dirks, , sets out to dismantle the traditional explanation that Britain's empire in India
was, in the famous words of Victorian historian J.R. Seeley, acquired 'in a fit of
absence of mind.' According to Dirks, there was nothing accidental about Britain's
'conquest' of the subcontinent in the late 18th century. He argues that public
exposure of the East India Company's scandalous corruption by the philosopher and
politician Edmund Burke during the Warren Hastings impeachment trial in 1788
persuaded the government to step in and administer what the British regarded as a
vulnerable, backward territory. This intrusive, imperialist behavior, claims the author,
helped cover up the 'corruption, venality, and duplicity' of Britain's presence in India,
which was recast as a civilizing mission that also happened to benefit the British
economy. In examining the Hastings case, Dirks scores many points, vaporizing
comforting visions of a benevolent empire, and he expertly unravels the complexities
of Burke.
But it it is in the systematiic expose of the looting of the country, where extortion by
all levels if the East India company was practiced with brazenness and arrogance
201
Michel Danino b. 1956
Born in 1956 at Honfleur (France) into a Jewish family recently emigrated from
Morocco, from the age of fifteen Michel Danino was drawn to India, some of her
great yogis, and soon to Sri Aurobindo and Mother and their view of evolution which
gives a new meaning to our existence on this earth. In 1977, dissatisfied after four
years of higher scientific studies, he left France for India, where he has since been
living.
Michel Danino participated in the English translation and publication of Mother’s
Agenda (13 volumes, Mother’s record of her yoga in the depths of the body
consciousness) and several books by Satprem (Mother’s confidant and recipient of
Mother’s Agenda). Michel Danino also edited, among other titles, India’s Rebirth (a
selection from Sri Aurobindo’s works about India, available online ; first published
in 1993, now in its 3rd edition, translated into nine Indian languages) and India the
Mother (a selection from Mother’s words, 1998).
Studying India’s culture and ancient history in the light of both Sri Aurobindo’s
pioneering work and archaeological research, in 1996 Michel Danino authored The
Invasion That Never Was, a brief study of the Aryan invasion theory. Intended
primarily for the educated non-specialist Indian public, the book has also been well
received in scholarly circles. A second, extensively revised and enlarged edition
was brought out in 2000; a third is scheduled for late 2003.
Over the last few years, Michel Danino has given lectures at various official,
academic and cultural forums on issues confronting Indian culture and civilization
in today’s world ; some of them have been published under the titles Sri Aurobindo
and Indian Civilization (1999), The Indian Mind Then and Now (2000), Is Indian
Culture Obsolete ? (2000), and Kali Yuga or the Age of Confusion (2001). Delving
into the roots of Indian civilization, Michel Danino has argued that its essential
values remain indispensable in today’s India — and in fact for all humanity in this
critical phase of global deculturization and dehumanization. Many of those lectures
and a few new ones are available on this homepage.
231
Michel Danino’s other fields of activity include Nature conservation; his action for
the preservation of an important pocket of native tropical rainforest in the Nilgiris
led to the creation of Tamil Nadu’s first “watchdog” committee in which concerned
citizens actively collaborated with both the Forest Department and local villagers in
conservation work, also involving local teachers and hundreds of students.
In 2001, Michel Danino convened the International Forum for India's Heritage (IFIH)
with over 160 eminent founder members, whose mission is to promote the essential
values of India's heritage in every field of life.
202
203
Iravathan Mahadevan
Dr. Iravathan Mahadevan is currently at the University of Chicago at Chennai. He has
spent considerable portion of his life trying to prove that script of the Indus Valley
could be derived off from the Dravidian languages. But the effort is generally
considered inconclusive
204
A D Pusalkar
Assistant Director and Head of the department of Sanskrit, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.
Assistant Editor of the History and culture of the Indian People. He was one of the
first to trace the dynastic succession from the time of Parikshit (the grandson of
Arjuna,), to the time of the Mauryas. While the total time period is in acdcordance
with Puranic history, the absolute dates he uses in the HCIP remains distorted and
corrupted by the need to placate the views of the Colonial Overlord. Now that India is
no longer in thrall to a colonial power, the time has come to settle this once and for
all.
205
V Raghavan
232
206
H D Sankalia
1908–89
Indian archaeologist who built the Department of Archaeology at Deccan College.
Born into a middle-class family in Bombay he studied Sanskrit for his first degree at
Bombay University and Indian history and culture for his MA degree. In 1932 he
completed a thesis on the ancient Buddhist educational establishment at Nalanda
before spending some time in London where he took a doctorate in 1936 on the
dynastic history of ancient monuments in Gujarat. During this time he worked for Sir
Mortimer Wheeler at Maiden Castle where he learnt the techniques of excavation. He
was selected as professor of proto-Indian and ancient Indian history at Deccan
College in Poona in 1939. Sankalia chaired the Department of Archaeology at Deccan
until his retirement in 1973, building the reputation of the department and developing
numerous programmes of survey and excavation in the region.
[Obit.: American Anthropologist, 92 (1990), 1006–10]
233
207
Pratipaditya Pal (194x ? )
Pratap Aditya Pal is a Fellow of Research at the Norton Simon Art Museum at
Pasadena, California, and Visiting curator of Indian,Himalayan and Southheastasian
Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been General editor of Marg Publications
of Mumbai, India since 1993.
Pratap Aditya Pal has been instrumental in educating the American public about the
arts of India, in the tradition of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch. He has
prodiced some outstanding booksd on the collection at the Normal Simon Musueum
at Los Angeles
208
209
Paul Martin DuBost
Paul Martin duBost has lived and studied for a number of years with the scholars of
kerala in india and is one of the very knowledgeable Indologists from Europe. His
work on Ganesha the Enchanter of Three worlds is fast becoming a classic in its own
right. He has also written a companion bnook on Sarasvati which is being translated
into English and will shortly be published in that language.
Ganesha
Sarasvati
210
234
211
Sita Ram Goel
235
212
K S Lal
MA in 1941
DPhil,
University
Allahabad, 1945
K.S. Lal is an Indian historian. He wrote many historical books, mainly on medieval
India. Many of his books, such as History of the Khaljis and Twilight of the Sultanate,
are regarded as standard works.[1][2][3]
of He has been courageous enough to call a spade a spade and describes the period of
islamic domination of the subcontinent, as one characterized by much destruction
and barbaric behavior. He has described in excruciating detail th debilitating tax
system which Allauddin had imposed on the farmers, leaving them just enough to
subsist till the next year so they could be fleeced year after year. While none of his
critics have the courage to question the accuracy of his writings, they neverthekess
feek that th every accuracy with which he portrays the period betrays a bias on his
part. Suxch is the temper of the times in India when being truthful is frowned upon
especially in matters of history.
The realtruth of the matter is that durting the time of the emergency, Indira Gasndhi
made a pact with Communists that she would rewqard them with influential positions
in academia , especially in subjects related to History in return for their political
support. The resulkt of this seemingly innocuous pact was that many position
amongst those
Career
He obtained his Master's degree in 1941 at the University of Allahabad. In 1945 he
obtained his D.Phil. with a dissertation on the history of the Khaljis. This dissertation
formed the basis for his book History of the Khaljis.
From 1945 to 1963 he taught at Government Colleges in Madhya Pradesh. After 1963,
he was a professor at the University of Delhi in Medieval Indian history.
236
He was fluent in Persian, Old Persian, Urdu and other languages.
Andrew Bostom's book The Legacy of Jihad contains several chapters written by K.
S. Lal.
Works
•
The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India. New Delhi, Aditya Prakashan, 1992. [1]
(ISBN 81-85689-03-2)
213
Bhagavan Singh
237
214
R S Bisht
R S Bisht is an archeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India . He and his
team have discovered many sites in India including Dholavira in the rann of Kutch.
Former Director, Institute of Archaeology, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.
He is well known as the Excavator of Dholavira. Apart from many research papers
and reports, his published work include, in collaboration with J.P. Joshi, India and
the Indus Civilization. Currently, he is Director (Excavation) in the Archeological
Survey of India.
Bisht, R.S. 1991. Dholavira: A New Horizon of the Indus Civilization. Puratattva 20:
7 1-82.
Wednesday, April 22, 1998
Dholavira upturns an idea or two
Anand Sundas
Dholavira, April 21: Dholavira. The lost empire that 300 labourers and a six-member
team of archaeologists have made it their mission to rediscover. Temperatures of 50
degree Celsius be damned. And finally, after seven long years of hope and sweat,
they have stumbled on to something really big.
It was perhaps a poignant irony of fate that a place which once cradled one of the
oldest and most sophisticated civilisations is today far from civilisation. So far that,
apart from the chartered tourism buses or the taxis that you succeed in hiring only
after much wrangling and enticing there is no mode of transportation to Dholavira.
But as they say, history repeats itself.
238
Dholavira, perched in the middle of the Khadir island, along the Rann of Kutch, is
again the cynosure of all eyes -- western and Indian -- especially after the excavation
of the oldest and largest reservoir with archaeologists expecting to unearth at least
60 metres more. So, apart from reports of Bill Clinton including the civilisational site
in his Indian itinerary, there is the National Geographic team camped out there and a
host of TV channels either in or trying to get in. Ministers, bureaucrats, businessmen
have suddenly woken up with a jolt to the reality that is Dholavira.
The site has also proven wrong some age-old and widely held archaeological
`truths'. For instance, Dholavira -- meaning white well -- has proven that the Indus
culture (Harappan, as archaeologists prefer to call it these days) was not totally a
riverine civilisation, as it is in the middle of a Rann.
215
Ian G Pearce (196X ?)
It iis important not to make broadbrush characterizations of western scholarship,
similar to the manner in which many European Indologists have done after the initial
period of adulation, and fall into the ‘Avidya’ trap (what I dont know cannot possibly
of much use’…. Ian Pearce has personally done much to ‘redress the balance’ as it
were. But it remains true nevertheless that half baked scholarship is still dominant
in American academic circles in areas related to Hinduism, as evidenced by the
recent case of the California Text Book controversy.
Ian G. Pearce ( ? ) has written: Mathematics has long been considered an invention
of European scholars, as a result of which the contributions of non-European
countries have been severely neglected in histories of mathematics. Worse still,
many key mathematical developments have been wrongly attributed to scholars of
European origin. This has led to so-called Eurocentrism. ...The purpose of my project
is to highlight the major mathematical contributions of Indian scholars and further to
emphasize where neglect has occurred and hence elucidate why the Eurocentric
ideal is an injustice and in some cases complete fabrication.
It is through the works of Vedic religion that we gain the first literary evidence of
Indian culture and hence mathematics. Written in Vedic Sanskrit the Vedic works,
Vedas and Vedangas (and later Sulbasutras) are primarily religious in content, but
embody a large amount of astronomical knowledge and hence a significant
knowledge of mathematics. ... 'The need to determine the correct times for Vedic
ceremonies and the accurate construction of altars led to the development of
astronomy and geometry.
I feel it important not to be controversial or sweeping, but it is likely European
scholars are resistant due to the way in which the inclusion of non-European,
including Indian, contributions shakes up views that have been held for hundreds of
years, and challenges the very foundations of the Eurocentric ideology. ... It is
almost more in the realms of psychology and culture that we argue about the effect
the discoveries of non-European science may have had on the 'psyche' of European
239
scholars. ... To summarize, the main reasons for the neglect of Indian mathematics
seem to be religious, cultural and psychological¡±
(source: Indian Mathematics: Redressing the balance' - 'Abstract' - By Ian G. Pearce
¨C '(IGP-IM:RB) 'Mathematics in the service of religion: I. Vedas and Vedangas' and
Conclusion.
216
Narahari Achar, Professor B.N.Narahari Achar had presented the date of Mahabharata war and related observed
of Astronomy,University of events described in the epic with extraordinary accuracy by Veda Vyasa in an
international colloquium (January 2003). Further researches by him have established
Memphis
the Mahabharata as the sheet-anchor of the history of Bharatam. The textual
references (Critical edition of Bhandarkar Institute) of observed events are related to
either planets or comets. In this note (July 2006), Achar establishes that some
references are emphatically to comets (mentioned as such in the text itself; graha
means both 'planet' and 'comet' and has to be interpreted in context). This brilliant
insight resolves the centuries' old problem of apparent inconsistencies within the
critical edition of the text. In fact, there are no inconsistencies. Mahabharata is
astonishingly accurate, making it the most authentic historical document in human
civilizational history.
Continuing the path-breaking use of planetarium software (of the type used by NASA
to launch satellites into cosmos), Achar also validates the date of Nirvana of the
Buddha. This date is consistent with the Tibetan Bauddha tradition which notes that
Gautama the Buddha lived in 19th century BCE. The skymaps of the 3067 and 1807
BCE map the important dates in Hindu civilization: the Great War and the Nirvana of
the Buddha, respectively.
Kalyanaraman (20 July 2006). Vyasa-Dhritarashtra Samvada by BN Achar
Annals of BORI, LXXXIV, (2003), pp 13-22). This document establishes 1) the
concordance between Atharvaveda Paris'is.t.a and the Mahabharata in relation to the
accounts related to comets and 2) internal consistency of astronomical observations
recorded in Udyogaparvan and Bhishmaparvan.
S. Kalyanaraman (28 July 2006).
240
217
Robert Sewell (1845 – 1925) Robert Sewell was a civil servant in colonial India. He is the author of the book A
Forgotten Empire Vijayanagar: A Contribution to the History of India. He did
extensive work on the history of the Vijayanagara Empire, particularly the fall of
Hampi, the empire's capital.
Sewell also translated The Vijayanagar Empire as seen by Domingo Paes and Fernao
Nuniz which is described as an eyewitness account of Portuguese travellers to India
in the 16th century and report on the
Vijayanagar empire.[1]
Notes
He also wrote extensivelly on the indian calendar
1. ^ Holdings of Kamat Memorial Library. Retrieved on 2007-01-10.
External links
•
•
218
Hermann Kulke
Works by Robert Sewell at Project Gutenberg
Download book for free or read online
Herman Kulke holds the chair of Indian history at the University of Kiel and has
published his version of the History of India for the benefit of German speakers. It is
a rather unremarkable effort and takes the conventional view of Indic chronology,
with the Harappans predating the Vedics . Notable for the lack of any original
thought into the subject
241
219
S Balachandra Rao
Prof Balachandra Rao has published several books on ancient indian astronomy
written in simple and clear language to provide access to the heritage of the orients
to those wo are not familiar wt Sanskrit . By so doing he has brought to the attention
of the general Indan public extensive developments in ancient Indian astronomy.
Thereby he has dispelled much of the mystery behind the calculations necessary for
the Indian panchang. India owes a lot to this individual for keping alive the memory
of the Indic Mathematical tradition .
Balachandra Rao., S., Tradition, Science and Society, Navakar i nataka Publications,
Bangalore, 1990.
Balachandra Rao. S., Mahãvirachäryas Contribution to Mathematics, Scientific
Heritage of India, The Mythic Society, Bangalore, 1988.
220
Raj Mohanka
221
Kalavai Venkat
242
Baklachandra Rao, S., Indian mathematics and Astronomy, Bhavans Gandhi Centre
for Values, Bharatiya Vidy a Bhavan, Bangalore., hid edition,2004
Balachandra Rao, S Indian Mathematics and Astronomy. Jnana Deep Publications,
Bangalore, 1994.
Developed a more rational chronology of the ancient Indics that is unencumbered by
dependence on the postulate of an Aryan Invasion, a postulate that can only be
regarded as a myth , until proven otherwise. All too often it is forgotten in the heat of
debate that the Aryan Invasion Postulate (AIP) is and always has been merely a
postulate for which no archaeological or literary proof has ever been proffered
Kalavai is one of the new breed of Indic historians who have shaken themselves
loose from the stranglehold that the Macaulay Marxist axioms have placed on
Ancient Indic History.
222
George
Joseph George Gheverghese Joseph was born in Kerala, Southern India, and lived in India
Gheverghese (194x ?)
until he was nine. His family then moved to Mombasa in Kenya where he received his
schooling. He studied at the University of Leicester and then worked for six years as
a teacher in Kenya before returning to pursue his postgraduate studies at
Manchester. His teaching and research have ranged over a broad spectrum of
subjects in applied mathematics and statistics, including multivariate analysis,
mathematical programming and demography. In recent years, however, his research
has been mainly on the cultural and historical aspects of mathematics with particular
emphasis on the non-European dimensions to the subject and its relevance
for mathematics education. He has travelled widely, holding university appointments
in East and Central Africa, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand as well as a Royal
Society Visiting Fellowship (twice) in India during which he gave lectures at several
universities. In 1992, he addressed a special session of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science at Boston. In 1993 he was invited by the African
National Congress of South Africa to take part in a Workshop on 'Mathematics
Curriculum Reconstruction for Society in Transition'. In recent years he has been
invited to lecture at Hobart, Monash, Perth and Sydney in Australia; at Cornell, Los
Angeles, New Mexico, New York, Berkeley and Chicago in the United States; at York,
Laval and Toronto in Canada; at Western Cape and Durban in South Africa; at UNAM
in Mexico; at Cave Hill in Barbados; and at various universities in Portugal, Spain,
Italy, Netherlands, Germany and Norway as well as the United Kingdom. He was
invited to Cuba to give the keynote address at the 1st International Conference on
Mathematics and Mathematics Education in 1996. In 1997 he gave the Aldis Lecture
at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and went on a British Council sponsored
lecturing tour to various universities in New Zealand. In January 2000, he
organised an International Seminar and Colloquium to commemorate the 1500th
year of Aryabhata's famous text, Aryabhateeyam, which was held in
Thiruvanthapuram, Kerala, India. He has appeared on radio and televisions
programmes in India, United States, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand as well
as United Kingdom. His publications include four books: Women at Work ( Philip
Allan, Oxford, 1983), The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics
( 1st Hardback Edition, Tauris, 1991; 1st Paperback Edition, Penguin 1992, 2nd 243
Edition, jointly by Penguin Books and Princeton University Press, 2000),
Multicultural Mathematics: Teaching Mathematics from a Global Perspective (Oxford
University Press, 1993) and George Joseph: Life and Times of a Kerala Christian
Nationalist (Orient Longman, 2003). The last named book is a political biography of
his grandfather, George Joseph, a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawarhalal
Nehru and other leaders of modern India. His book, The Crest of the Peacock, has
been translated into Italian entitled C'era una Volta un Numero (il Saggiatore, 2000),
into Japanese (1995) and Spanish entitled La Cresta del Pavo Real (Piramide, 1996).
A Malayalam translation of the book is imminent. He is also the author of about 70
223
224
244
Pierre Fermat
225
Edmund Leach
(November
7,
January 6, 1989)
1910
– Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist.
He was provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966-1979, was made a Fellow of
the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975. He introduced Claude LéviStrauss into British social anthropology.
To quote Subhas Kak
“It is bad enough if a fabrication-- a story-- is palmed off as the truth, but what if the
fabrication is driven not just by poor logic but by racism?
Ten years ago, the distinguished British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, wrote a
famous essay on this problem titled ``Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia''.
Published in a book called ``Culture Through Time'' (edited by Emiko OhnukiTierney, Stanford University Press, 1990), this essay exposed the racist basis of the
19th century construction of Indian prehistory and, perhaps more important for us, it
showed how racism persists in the academic approach to the study of India. The
implication of Leach's charge is that many of the assumptions at the basis of the
academic study of Indian social organization, language development, and evolution
of religion are simply wrong! Here are some excerpts from this essay:
Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?... Why is this
sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early
Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?...
Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied
in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been
used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what
was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this
happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously
245
existing population!
The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework... Because of their
commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed
to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-IndoIranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it
followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by
those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived
the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED.
226
Key
Areas where the Chronology of Indian History
record
is yet to be
corrected
The Origin of the Brahmi script
Depiction of Hinduism in american academia
Silence and/or negation on Indic contributions in Astronomy and mathematics
The invention of the calculus by Kera mathematicians
227
228
246
Depiction of Hinduism in
American Academia
229
C K Raju
230
Leonhard Euler
231
California
Text
Controversy
C. K. Raju holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute. He taught mathematics
for several years before playing a lead role in the C-DAC team which built Param:
India’s first parallel supercomputer. His earlier book Time: Towards a Consistent
Theory
(Kluwer Academic, 1994) set out a new physics with a tilt in the arrow of time. He has
been a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and is a Professor of
Computer _Applications. He is an editor of the _Journal of Indian Council of
Philosophical Research, and an Editorial Fellow of the Centre for Studies in
Civilizations, bringing out a three part volume on science and technology in modern
India for the Project of History of
_Indian Science, Philosophy, and Culture. He also coordinates an Indian National
Science _Academy Project on “Madhava and the Origin of the Differential Calculus”
and is an _Affiliated Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. After much
research in Spain and Italy into the records o f the Society of Jesus, he concludes
that there was massive intellectual property theft by the SJ, who had stationed 60 to
70 Jesuits in Cochin withtheexpress purpose of learning the calendar and purloining
a accurate table of sine values which were not available in Europe yet, whereas
Indian astronomers were already using infinite sseries to evaluate suich functions to
any desired accuracy
Book
247
232
C T Rajagopal
233
Buddhism
–
Indology
scholars who focused their
study oin Buddhism
Indologists who studied
Buddhism[ most of whom
are not included in our list
and may be included ina
subsequent
volume
or
volumes. This is by no
means an exhaustive list
248
Was instrumental. In resurrecting the work of the Kerala school of mathematics in a
series of papers with his colleagues. The Kerala school of Astronomy was founded
by Madhava of Sangramagrama, but their work would probably have languished in
obscurity had it not been for the series of papers written by Rajagopal and his
colleagues. Charles Whish ,made an impact by bringing it to the attention of the
world. For 200 years the school flourished, while the list of people with this
knowledge dwindled down to handful
B. R. Ambedkar • Lokesh Chandra • Edward Conze • Alexandra David-Néel • Kelsang
Gyatso • Dalai Lama • Walpola Rahula • C.A.F. Rhys Davids • T.W. Rhys Davids •
Seongcheol • Sogyal Rinpoche • Robert Thurman • Richard Gombrich • Chah
Subhatto • Thanissaro Bhikkhu • Bhikkhu Bodhi • Nyanaponika Thera • Jack
Kornfield • Gil Fronsdal • Seongcheol • Nishida Kitaro • Scott Shaw • D.T. Suzuki •
Paul Reps • Alan Watts • Thich Nhat Hanh • Yin Shun
234
Indologists who studied
Hinduism, Sikhism and
Jainism who may not
currently included in our
list
Hindu writers: Aurobindo • A. Coomaraswamy • Bankim • Alain Daniélou • Dayananda
• Sita Ram Goel • The Mother • Prabhupada • Sivananda • Ram Swarup • Tilak •
Vivekananda
•
Yogananda
Jain writers: Satish Kumar • Claudia Pastorino • Yashodev Suri • Jayantsain Suri
Sikh writers: Bhai Vir Singh • Harjot Oberoi • G.S. Talib • Khushwant Singh
Other/Syncretic: Gurumaa • Annie Besant • Ram Dass • Sathya Sai Baba • Georg
Feuerstein • H. S. Olcott • Meher Baba • Osho • Ken Wilber • Nirmala Srivastava
249
235
250
236
The Organization of Vedic Literature
General Conclusions
Do we see any patterns in the assessments of the various Indologists over the ages. It is difficult to generalize and we
prefer to let the words of each Indologist speak for his own assessment;
Generally speaking the opinion of indologists prior to the colonial era were generally positive.
After the discovery of Sanskrit by the occidental world, the assessment of philosophers (Schopenhauer, Schlegei, von
Humboldt, Voltaire of the Indic contribution to world civilization was always far more positive than that of Indologists,
focused primarily on linguistics (Weber, Roth, MaxMueller, ). English historians (James Mill, )were generally negative
about India or guardedly in the positive column with a few exceptions (Montstuart Elphinstone, Alexander Hamilton, Sir
Thomas Munro and among the exceptions were quite a few Scots (e.g.John Playfair)
The German indologists(Weber, Franz Bopp, MaxMueller , Buhler, Thibaut) uniformly tried to undermine the antiquity of
India and to a man were arguing for the Aryan Invasion Theory, trying to push it as close possible to the Christian era.
They followed the Hegelian principle that nothing worthwhile originated in India and that India had no historical agency.
The exception was Herman Jacobi
By and large French Indologists were positive about the antiquity as well as the contributions of the Indic civilization
and remaine refreshingly original in their assessments (Sylvain Bailly, Roger Billard, Martin du Bost, Voltaire, George
Coedes). The French interest in indology was nurtured initially by the legacy of Napoleon, but then took on a life of its
own. The French collection of manuscripts at the Bibliotheque National and other institiutions is one of the largest In
the world outside of India and the UK
Criteria for Inclusion
A word as to the choices we made of the Indologists we chose to focus on in our study. Clearly, the universe of
Individuals who studied India is very large and we had to exercise discrimination in our choice. While personal
preferences play a big part and caprice rears its head every once in a while, we engaged in certain criteria during the
251
process of selection,
There must be a significant indic connection whether directly or indirectly (in the content of their work). There are
several individuals who qualify in this list because their weltanschuung is substantially in accord with the Indic
Vedantic tradition.
The impact of the individual on the world and/or India was signicant, though it may not always have been recognized
as such during the lifetime of the individual. Has the perception of the world about India changed (for better or worse)
because of this Individual.
References
http://books.google.com/books?id=S720d-apNkC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=henry+thomas+colebrook+indologist&source=web&ots=Bf5ndXjxXP&sig=iG2CBPCj_TZU
MgcbvzX6rFky4gA#PPP1,M1
Great Encounter: A Study of Indo-American Literature and Cultural ... - Google Books Result
by Raj Kumar Gupta - 1986 - 284
pages
... an unusual combination of learning, insight, and common sense, in a manner reminiscent of the distinguished British
Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke. ...
http://books.google.com/books?id=uca8R72W8iQC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=henry+thomas+colebrook+indologist&sou
rce=web&ots=c-yIUAC4Xc&sig=cKntZCBDtEC2DQbazxgMycxGSeM
Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought - Google Books Result
by Richard King - 1999 - 224 pages
Hegel became aware, through the work of the English Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837), of the apparent
existence of Indian forms of philosophy
...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0748609547...
252
i
Bernard Cohn “Colonialism and its forms of knowledge Oxford Univerrsity Press, 1997
253