INTRODUCTION: INDIA and her ancient culture ( Part -2)

How far this judgement is a fair one is very dubious. Though an element of quietism certainly existed in the ancient Indian attitude to life, as it does in India today, it was never approved by moralists. The great achievements of ancient India and Ceylon—their immense irrigation works and splendid temples, and the long campaigns of their armies—do not suggest a devitalized people. If the climate had any effect on the Indian character it was, we believe, to develop a love of ease and comfort, an addiction to the simple pleasures and luxuries so freely given by Nature—a tendency to which the impulse to self-denial and asceticism on the one hand, and occasional strenuous effort on the other, were natural reactions.

THE DISCOVERY OF ANCIENT INDIA

The ancient civilization of India differs from those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, in that its traditions have been preserved without a break down to the present day. Until the advent of the archaeologist, the peasant of Egypt or Iraq had no knowledge of the culture of his forefathers, and it is doubtful whether his Greek counterpart had any but the vaguest ideas about the glory of Peri- clean Athens. In each case there had been an almost complete break with the past. On the other hand, the earliest Europeans to visit India found a culture fully conscious of its own antiquity—a culture which indeed exaggerated that antiquity, and claimed not to have fundamentally changed for many thousands of years. To this day legends known to the humblest Indian recall the names of shadowy chieftains who lived nearly a thousand years before Christ, and the orthodox brahman in his daily worship repeats hymns composed even earlier. India and China have, in fact, the oldest continuous cultural traditions in the world.

Until the last half of the 18th century Europeans made no real attempt to study India’s ancient past, and her early history was known only from brief passages in the works of Greek and Latin authors. A few devoted missionaries in the Peninsula gained a deep understanding of contemporary Indian life, and a brilliant mastery of the vernaculars, but they made no real attempt to understand the historical background of the culture of the people among whom they worked. They accepted that culture at its face value, as very ancient and unchanging, and their only studies of India’s past were in the nature of speculations linking the Indians with the descendants of Noah and the vanished empires of the Bible. Meanwhile a few Jesuits succeeded in mastering Sanskrit, the classical language of India. One of them, Father Hanxleden, who worked in Kerala from 1699 to 1732, compiled the first Sanskrit grammar in a European tongue, which remained in manuscript, but was used by his successors.

Another, Father Coeurdoux, in 1767, was probably the first student to recognize the kinship of Sanskrit and the languages of Europe, and suggested that the brahmans of India were descended from one of the sons of Japhet, whose brothers migrated to the West. Yet the Jesuits, for all their studies, gained no real understanding of India’s past: the foundations of Indology were laid independently, in another part of India, and by other hands. In the year 1783 one of the most brilliant men of the 18th century, Sir William Jones (1746-94) (pi. IVa), came to Calcutta as a judge of the Supreme Court, under the governor-generalship of Warren Hastings, who himself had deep sympathy with both Muslim and Hindu culture. Jones was a linguistic genius, who had already learnt all the more important languages of Europe as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and had even obtained a smattering of Chinese with the aid of the very inadequate material which was available at the time. Before coming to India he had recognized the relationship of European languages to Persian, and had rejected the orthodox view of the 18th century, that all these tongues were derived from Hebrew, which had been garbled at the Tower ofBabel. In place of this dogma Jones suggested that Persian and the European languages were derived from a common ancestor which was not Hebrew.

Of the little band of Englishmen who administered Bengal for the Honourable East India Company only one, Charles Wilkins (1749- 1836), had managed to learn Sanskrit. With the aid of Wilkins and friendly Bengali pandits Jones began to learn the language. On the first day of 1784 the Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded, on Jones’ initiative, and with Jones himself as president. In the journal of this society, Asiatic Researches, the first real steps in revealing India’s past were taken. In November 1784 the first direct translation of a Sanskrit work into English, Wilkins’s Bhagavad Gita, was com¬ pleted. This Wilkins followed in 1787 with a translation of the Hitopadela. In 1789 Jones translated Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, which went into five English editions in less than twenty years; this he followed by translations of the Gita Govinda (1792), and the law¬ book of Manu (published posthumously in 1794 under the title Institutes of Hindoo Law). Several less important translations appeared in successive issues of Asiatic Researches.

Jones and Wilkins were truly the fathers of Indology. They were followed in Calcutta by Henry Colebrooke (1765-1837) and Horace Hayman Wilson (1789-1860). To the works of these pioneers must be added that of the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron, a Persian scholar who, in 1786, published a translation of four Upanisads from a 17th-century Persian version—the translation of the whole manu¬ script, containing 50 Upanisads, appearing in 1801.

Interest in Sanskrit literature began to grow in Europe as a result of these translations. In 1795 the government of the French Republic founded the ficole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, and there Alex¬ ander Hamilton (1762-1824), one of the founding members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, held prisoner on parole in France at the end of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, became the first person to teach San¬ skrit in Europe. It was from Hamilton that Friedrich Schlegel, the first German Sanskritist, learnt the language. The first university chair of Sanskrit was founded at the College de France in 1814, and held by Leonard de Chezy, while from 1818 onwards the larger German universities set up professorships. Sanskrit was first taught in England in 1805 at the training college of the East India Company at Hertford. The earliest English chair was the Boden Professor¬ ship at Oxford, first filled in 1832, when it was conferred upon H. H. Wilson, who had been an important member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Chairs were afterwards founded at London, Cambridge and Edinburgh, and at several other universities of Europe and America.

In 1816, Franz Bopp (1791-1867), a Bavarian, on the basis of the hints of Sir William Jones, succeeded in very tentatively recon¬ structing the common ancestor of Sanskrit and the classical languages of Europe, and comparative philology became an independent science. In 1821, the French Societe Asiatique was founded in Paris, followed two years later by the Royal Asiatic Society in London. From these beginnings the work of the editing and study of ancient Indian literature went on apace throughout the 19th century. Probably the greatest achievement of Indological scholar¬ ship in 19th-century Europe was the enormous Sanskrit-German dictionary generally known as the St. Petersburg Lexicon, produced by the German scholars Otto Bohtlingk and Rudolf Roth, and pub¬ lished in parts by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences from 1852 to 1875. England’s greatest contributions to Sanskrit studies were the splendid edition of the Rg Veda, and the great series of authoritative annotated translations, Sacred Books of the East. Both these works were edited by the great German Sanskritist Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), who spent most of his working life as Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford.

Meanwhile the study of ancient Indian culture was proceeding in another direction. The first work of the Asiatic Society of Bengal had been almost entirely literary and linguistic, and most of the 19th- century Indologists were primarily scholars in the classical tradition, working on written records. Early in the 19th century, however.