SCHLEGEL: SANSKRIT IS THE MOTHER OF ALL LANGUAGES

Aryan Migration was From India

Nationalism, as an ethos, is never the brainchild of the West and it never had its origins in Europe. German Nationalism as it began through the work of the German Romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, traced their intellectual and philosophical underpinnings to India.

German nationalism also grew as a reaction to political and cultural domination by the colonial powers of the West, Britain and France. While Indian nationalists looked towards their own religion, myth, and philosophy, the Germans depended on Indian philosophy and culture as the antidote to the pervasive materialism of the West’s philosophies. Indian nationalism, in turn, received much nourishment from German philosophers, like Schlegel.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772 – 1829), the German poet fascinated with India, was also a literary critic, philosopher, and philologist. His older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, was a leading figure of Jena Romanticism. Jena Romanticism is the first phase of Romanticism in German literature represented by the work of a group centred in Jena, a scholastic city in Germany, from about 1798 to 1804. The movement contributed to the development of German nationalism in modern philosophy.

The first to notice what became known as Grimm's law, Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, and morphological typology, publishing in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group. (1)

Schlegel

Born into a Protestant family, Schlegel rejected religion as a young man in favour of atheism and individualism. He entered university to study law but instead focused on classical literature. As a writer and lecturer, he founded journals such as Athenaeum. In 1808, Schlegel returned to Christianity, with his wife, Dorothea Schlegel being baptized into the Catholic Church. This conversion ultimately led to his estrangement from family and old friends. He moved to Austria in 1809, where he became a diplomat and journalist in service of Klemens von Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire.

Schlegel, as a promoter of the Romantic movement, inspired English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński.

He was born in Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was the pastor at the Lutheran Market Church. He studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig for two years, where he met with German playwright Friedrich Schiller. In 1793 he chose literary work, as his career. In 1796 he moved to Jena, where his brother August Wilhelm lived, and there he collaborated with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Johann Fichte, and Caroline Schelling, who married August Wilhelm. Novalis and Schlegel had a famous conversation about German idealism. In 1797 he quarrelled with Schiller, who did not like his polemic work. (2)

Schlegel published Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed in 1798 by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (History of the Poesy of the Greeks and Romans). Then he turned to Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare. In Jena, he and his brother founded the journal Athenaeum, contributing fragments, aphorisms, and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school were elaborated. They are now generally recognized as the most profound expressions of the subjective idealism of the early Romanticists. (3)

Schlegel decided to move to Berlin after a controversy involving his affair with Dorothea, a Jew, who was married to merchant and banker, Simon Weit. Dorothea Mendelssohn, the eldest daughter of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was an author and editor whose work received little recognition during her lifetime. While married, she became active in Berlin’s dynamic salon subculture, and in 1794 she began calling herself Dorothea rather than her birth name of Brendel.

In 1799 she fell in love with Schlegel and divorced Veit that same year. Her relationship with Schelegel alienated Dorothea from her family; the couple left Berlin and travelled to Jena, Paris, and Cologne before settling in Vienna, where they married and converted to Catholicism in 1808. The two decades spent in Vienna were Dorothea’s happiest. Under Schlegel’s name, Dorothea published her only novel Florentin in 1799, and her edited volumes of medieval French texts in 1802.

In Berlin, Schlegel lived with philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher and met authors Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and also Dorothea Veit. (4) In 1799 he published Lucinde, which was seen as an account of his affair with Dorothea, causing a scandal in German literary circles. The unfinished novel attempted to apply the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom to practical ethics. (5) Lucinde, which extolled the union of sensual and spiritual love as an allegory of the divine cosmic Eros, contributed to the failure of his academic career in Jena (6) where he completed his studies in 1801 and lectured on transcendental philosophy. In September 1800, he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, which was a failure.

In June 1802 he arrived in Paris, where he lived in the house formerly owned by French philosopher Baron d'Holbach and joined a circle including painter Heinrich Christoph Kolbe. He lectured on philosophy in private courses for Sulpiz Boisserée. Under the tutelage of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy and linguist Alexander Hamilton, he continued to study Sanskrit and Persian.

First Sanskrit Professor in France

Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (1773 – 1832) was a French orientalist and one of the first European scholars of Sanskrit. His father, Antoine de Chézy (1718–1798), was an engineer who finally became director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées. The son was intended for his father's profession, but in 1799 he obtained a post in the oriental manuscripts department of the national library. In about 1803, he began studying Sanskrit, and although he possessed no grammar or dictionary, he succeeded in acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to compose poetry in it.

In Paris sometime between 1800 and 1805, Schlegel's wife Dorothea introduced him to the Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, called Hermina or Hermine, who, extremely unusually for the time, was a very young divorcée who had come to Paris to be a correspondent for German newspapers. In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter.

Chezy

He was the first professor of Sanskrit appointed in the Collège de France (1815), where his pupils included Alexandre Langlois, Auguste-Louis-Armand Loiseleur-Deslongchamps and especially Eugène Burnouf, who would become his successor at the Collège on his death in 1832.

He is the author of numerous editions and translations of Oriental works. La Mort de Yadjnadatta (Paris, 1814, and with Sanskrit text, 1826) is a translation of a well-known episode of the Ramayana, describing the slaying of a hermit by King Dasaratha. A translation of another episode, the fight of Lakshmana with the giant Atikaya appeared in 1818. Chézy's most notable work, however, was the publication in 1820 of Kalidasa's famous drama, Abhinjana Sakuntala under the title La reconnaissance de Sacountala. This was the first time that the Sanskrit text of this masterpiece was printed. Other works of his are an analysis of the Meghaduta (1817), Anthologie érotique d'Amarou, a translation of Sankaracharya's Amarusataka, which appeared under the pseudonym of Apudy in 1831, and La théorie du Sloka (1829), a disquisition on Sanskrit metre.

First European Professor of Sanskrit

Schlegel's other tutor Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824) was a British linguist who was one of the first Europeans to study the Sanskrit language. He taught the language to most of the earliest European scholars of Indo-European linguistics. He became the first professor of Sanskrit in Europe. Hamilton seems to have been born in India, but Scotland is not impossible. He was a first cousin of his namesake, American statesman Alexander Hamilton. He became a lieutenant in the navy of the East India Company and arrived in India in 1783. While stationed in India he joined the Asiatic Society of Bengal founded by Sir William Jones and Sir Charles Wilkins. He also married a Bengali woman.

After the death of Jones in India, Wilkins and Hamilton were the only Europeans who had studied Sanskrit. Both returned to Europe around 1797. Wilkins remained in England but Hamilton went to France after the Treaty of Amiens (1802) to collate Sanskrit manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He completed the cataloguing in 1813.

After war broke out between Britain and France in 1803 Hamilton was interned as an enemy alien, but was released to carry on his research at the insistence of the French scholar Constantine Volney. Hamilton taught Sanskrit to Volney and others, including Schlegel and Jean-Louis Burnouf, the father of Eugene Burnouf. Hamilton spend most of his time compiling a catalogue of Indian manuscripts in the library which was published in 1807. Hamilton lived in Schlegel's house, the former house of Baron d'Holbach in Rue de Clichy, together with Sulpiz Boisserée and his brother.

In 1806 he was appointed at Hertford College, becoming the first Sanskrit professor in Europe. He became a professor of "Sanscrit and Hindoo literature" at Haileybury College. He assisted Wilkins with his revisions to his translation of the Hitopadesha. Following the end of the Napoleonic wars many German scholars came to study with him, notably Franz Bopp and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

Meanwhile, Karl Wilhelm Schlegel edited the journal Europa (1803), where he published essays about Gothic architecture and the Old Masters. In April 1804 he married Dorothea in the Swedish embassy in Paris after she had undergone the requisite conversion from Judaism to Protestantism. In 1806 he and his wife went to visit Aubergenville, where his brother lived with Madame de Staël. 

In 1808, he published the epic, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India). 

In 1808, he and his wife joined the Catholic Church in the Cologne Cathedral. From this time on, he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious liberalism. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the military headquarters, editing the army newspaper and issuing fiery proclamations against Napoleon. He accompanied Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen to war and was stationed in Pest during the War of the Fifth Coalition. Here he studied the Hungarian language. Meanwhile, he published his collected Geschichte (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures, Über die neuere Geschichte (On Recent History) (1811) and Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (On Old and New Literature) (1815).

Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), he was a councillor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfurt Diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. In 1819 he and Clemens Brentano made a trip to Rome, in the company of Metternich and Gentz. There he met with his wife and her sons. In 1820 he started a conservative Catholic magazine, Concordia (1820–1823), but was criticized by Metternich and by his brother August Wilhelm, then professor of Indology in Bonn and busy publishing the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel began the issue of his Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life-1828) and in his Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History-1829).

Schlegel died in 1829, at the age of 56. Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea had two sons by her first marriage, Johannes and Philipp Veit, who became eminent Catholic painters.

Schlegel's India

Schlegel studied Sanskrit for over forty years, under the tutelage of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy and Alexander Hamilton – the earliest European scholars of Sanskrit. A pioneer of comparative linguistics, he pointed out the grammatical and syntactical similarities between Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages. He hypothesised Sanskrit was the ancient progenitor of this family of languages. In the influential book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India-1808), where he first argued that a people from India (the prototypical “Aryans”) had founded the ancient European civilisations.

Here he advanced his ideas about religion and importantly argued that people from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. Schlegel compared Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, Persian and German, noting many similarities in vocabulary and grammar. The assertion of the common features of these languages is now generally accepted, albeit with significant revisions. The pseudo-secularists are hell-bent on discrediting the Out-of-India model.

Schlegel found Sanskrit is the mother language. Based on it and migrations out of India, Schlegel explained the preponderance of disparate European cultures and languages as offshoots of a unified Aryan culture. In 1819, he published the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group. He theorised that the word “Arya” had been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning, “the honourable people”.

Parallel to it, Indian nationalists were also formulating similar theories about the Indian origins of the Aryans based on Hindu religious texts. So, Schlegel’s work carried weight in India. Gandhi also took note of it.

Schlegel’s argument for “Hindustan holding [sic] the first rank in time” in terms of philosophy and metaphysics, appears in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, published in 1909. Similarly, Bal Gangadhar Tilak put forward the theory of the Aryan homeland in India and the Aryans’ migration from India. The works of Aurobindo Ghosh and Dayanand Saraswati also popularised Schlegel’s version of the Aryans.

Gandhi's chief concern in Hind Swaraj is that India was slowly but surely accepting the 'modern civilisation' imposed on it by the British rulers. This included the so-called peace which in reality was 'nominal' as it was based on the strength of bayonets and in the process had made Indians "emasculated and cowardly". (7) The prevalent belief that Hindus and Muslims were sworn enemies and were separate nationalities was a 'construction' of the British for their own selfish purposes. About the British historical perspective on India, he writes, "they have (the) habit of writing history, they pretend to study the manners and customs of all peoples. . . and hypnotize us into believing them. We in our ignorance then fall at their feet." (8) English education in his opinion had 'enslaved' India and driven a wedge between different sections of people. (9)

Schlegel’s works are not only relevant to the early history of Indian nationalism, but to modern India too. Aryan migration from India westwards is known contemporarily as “Indigenous Aryanism.” It is still a contentious point of debate between the scholars of Hindutva and the academic historians of the ancient history of India. Indigenous Aryanism, the “Out of India” theory, is contrasted with the general “Indo-Aryan Migration theory”, which considers the Pontic steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.

Hindutva scholars, based on evidence from Puranic versions of history, and interpretations of the, reject the migration theory in favour of an interpretation similar to Schlegel. Sanskrit is the mother of all Indo-European languages, and Indo-Iranian Aryans are the forefathers of their Western counterparts. An unbroken Vedic culture continues from the Harappan civilisation to the present and thus exists a pan-Indian history.

The Indo-Aryan migration model was previously termed the Indo-Aryan invasion model. Hindutva scholars point out that the Indo-Aryan migration models are part of the colonial scholarship manufactured to show the dominance of the white races over their darker-skinned Indians.

Schlegel's theory is in tune with the notion of an undisturbed ancient Hindu identity for Indians. Based on it, Hindus can be seen as the original inhibitors of Aryavartha, the original India, which include India's neighbours. A unified Vedic culture existed and still exists as a pan-Indian cultural ethos from the Indus Valley Civilisation period. This idea is reflected in the philosophy of people like M S Golwalkar and Veer Savarkar.

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1. Watkins, Calvert (2000), "Aryan", American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), New York: Houghton Mifflin.

2. Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, 1993, p. 36.

3.Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von". In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.

4.Speight , Allen (2007). "Friedrich Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

5. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

6.Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.

7. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 38.

8. Ibid, p. 46.

9. Ibid, pp. 78-79.

© Ramachandran