Eurocentrism Is a Fad
According to folklore, Kalidasa, though handsome, was a complete dunce. When some wise men saw him sitting on the wrong end of the branch of a tree while trying to see it off, they conspired that he was the perfect match to teach the haughty princess Vidyottama a lesson. She took great pride in her intellect and vowed she would only marry someone who could defeat her in Shastrartha (scholastic debate).
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| King Vikramaditya statue at Ujjain |
Kalidasa was presented as a learned man who had undertaken a maun vrata (vow of silence) and would communicate only using sign language. During their exchange, the princess showed him one finger (to mean shakti is one). He thought she meant to poke his eye out, so he showed her two fingers to indicate he would poke both her eyes out. The wise men interpreted his response to mean shakti is the reflection of duality. Vidyottama then showed him her outstretched palm, to indicate the world is made of five elements. He thought she was going to slap him, and responded by showing his fist. She accepted it as a response that the five elements constitute the whole body.
The two were married, but soon after, the princess realized the truth and threw him out. Distraught, he came to the temple of Kali in Ujjain and offered to cut off his infernal tongue as a sacrifice. The goddess was appeased and granted him profound wisdom, and he took on the name Kalidasa (servant of Kali). When he returned home, Vidyottama asked in chaste Sanskrit, “Asti kashchit vaag-vishesha” (Do you have anything special to say?). In response, Kalidasa is said to have used her words to write three poems of exceptional literary beauty. He began his epic poem Kumarasambhavam with the words “asti-uttarasyaam dishi”. The lyrical poem Meghdootam began with“kashchit-kaantaa” and “vaag arthaaviva” were the opening words of Raghuvamsam.
The two were married, but soon after, the princess realized the truth and threw him out. Distraught, he came to the temple of Kali in Ujjain and offered to cut off his infernal tongue as a sacrifice. The goddess was appeased and granted him profound wisdom, and he took on the name Kalidasa (servant of Kali). When he returned home, Vidyottama asked in chaste Sanskrit, “Asti kashchit vaag-vishesha” (Do you have anything special to say?). In response, Kalidasa is said to have used her words to write three poems of exceptional literary beauty. He began his epic poem Kumarasambhavam with the words “asti-uttarasyaam dishi”. The lyrical poem Meghdootam began with“kashchit-kaantaa” and “vaag arthaaviva” were the opening words of Raghuvamsam.
More than twenty centuries later, the epic poet of Germany, Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa. While Sanskrit and the Indian civilization conquered Europe culturally, two venomous ideologies made their destructive facade visible- Eurocentrism and Marxism. The religious colonizing zeal of Europe hasn't disappeared forever.
On 3 June 2022, In an interactive session at a conference in the Slovakian capital Bratislava, Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar said: "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems."
The strong comments by Jaishankar came amid persistent efforts by the European countries to convince India to take a tough position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the argument that New Delhi may face a similar challenge from China in the future.
“In terms of the connection you are making, we have a difficult relationship with China and we are perfectly capable of managing it. If I get global understanding and support, obviously it is of help to me,” Jaishankar said.
“But this idea that I do a transaction – I come in one conflict because it will help me in conflict two. That’s not how the world works. A lot of our problems in China have nothing to do with Ukraine and have nothing to do with Russia. They are predated,” he said.
Jaishankar was asked why he thinks anyone will help New Delhi in case of a problem with China after it did not help others for Ukraine.
“Somewhere Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems. That if it is you, it’s yours, if it is me it is ours. I see reflections of that,” he said.
“There is a linkage today which is being made. A linkage between China and India and what’s happening in Ukraine. China and India happened way before anything happened in Ukraine. The Chinese do not need a precedent somewhere else on how to engage us or not engage us or be difficult with us or not be difficult with us,” he said.
Jaishankar said Europe was also silent on many developments in Asia.
“If I were to take Europe collectively which has been singularly silent on many things which were happening, for example in Asia, you could ask why would anybody in Asia trust Europe on anything at all,” he said.
It was a bold attack on Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism has been defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and development. (1)
In Eurocentric narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its economic and political systems and the quality of life enjoyed by its societies. But for Indians, Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, as it is intimately tied to and constituted in the violence and asymmetry of colonial and imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this diabolism not only possible but also acceptable or justifiable.
Significant critiques of Eurocentrism emerged in the context of post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial and anti-imperial movements. Even so, institutional practices that privilege Eurocentric epistemologies continue to haunt the third world in disturbing ways. Thus, India is reinventing itself, realizing the heinous designs Europe had unleashed on India. At the same time, there were several Indologists in Europe, who had realized that India is the cradle of civilization.
Max Muller and Ralph Griffith translated the Vedas. Monier Williams wrote Hinduism and its Sources. Maurice Bloomfield prepared the monumental Vedic Dictionary, A Vedic Concordance. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the poem, Brahma. German scholars translated the Upanishads. The great German poet Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866) wrote a six-volume monumental maha kavya, Brahma Jnanam. (Die Weisheit des Brahmanen, The Wisdom of the Brahmins). Rückert, who had been an expert on Arabic and Persian, also made a name for himself with the translation of the "Mahabharata" legends.
Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam.
The German poet, philosopher and Indologist, Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772-1829), published an epoch-making book in 1808, On the Language and Wisdom of India. (Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier). In the book, he argued that people originating from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. He pointed out, “India is superior in everything — intellectually, religiously, even Greek heritage seems pale in comparison.” In 1818 he became the first professor of Indology at Bonn University.
German philosopher and literary critic Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) remarked: “‘Mankind’s origins can be traced to India where the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the great German philosopher was amazed by the wisdom of the Vedas and reflected: “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and as elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death. They are the product of the highest wisdom. Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.”
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German Romantic poet, essayist and journalist, said: “The Portuguese, Dutch and the English have been for a long time, year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.”
August Wilhelm Schlegel, professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe produced a Latin translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1823. It was the first Sanskrit book printed in Europe. This was the first of a self-financed, self-published series known as ‘The Indian Library’, which also included translations of the Ramayana and the Hitopadesha.
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a Prussian philosopher and diplomat, on reading the Bhagavad Gita, said, “I read the poem for the first time today. I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let me be acquainted with this work. It must be the most sublime thing to be found in the world.”
German Indologist and Philosopher Paul Jakob Deussen (1845-1919) was strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer. He was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and Swami Vivekananda, and even gave himself a Sanskrit name, Deva-Sena, as a mark of his admiration for Hinduism.
Werner Heisenberg (1901- 1976), Nobel Prize winner and co-founder of quantum physics, found revelations in Indian philosophy, and once articulated that “after the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of quantum physics that had seemed crazy suddenly made much more sense”.
But It was the British, who formally created the subject of Indology at the end of the 18th Century when the English scientist William Jones (1746-1794) founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata in 1784. But before that, there was a market for Sanskrit, albeit a small one.
The real beginnings of Sanskrit studies did not really kick off in Germany until the beginning of the 19th century – making Germany the first European country after the British to introduce the subject at universities, where scholars devoted themselves to translating antique religious texts and poetry.
Some of Germany's first Sanskrit scholars were famous personalities, like Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt corresponded with the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with whom he discussed the Bhagavad Gita.
Some works by German philosophers and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche also mention Sanskrit works and are thus proof of the attraction Sanskrit had in Europe.
Academic pursuits of the Germans were focused on the Indian traditional knowledge systems: Metaphysics, Astronomy, Mathematics, Ayurveda, Theosophy, Literature, and Folk traditions. German scholars and missionaries promoted the Indian language with translations and transliterations. The role of the Basel mission in promoting Indian languages like Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, was tremendous.
The contribution of German missionaries to the study of Indian languages, customs, cultural identities and religious practices was part of a European agenda and unsurpassed in the thorough methodology and meticulous documentation. Even though the inadvertent religious bias was always present in their scholastic background, the academic identity they created for Indian languages was highly pedagogic. The German writers had no colonial interest in exploring classical Indian Sanskrit, and their interest in Indian classical literature was purely academic, though it was not the case with missionaries.
The Jesuit agenda
The very first Jesuit mission with the aim of Christianizing India started with the arrival of Francis Xavier (1506–52) in 1542. The Portuguese were the patrons of the Jesuit missions and they called their historiographies on India Estado da Índia. As a new religious order specifically available for overseas missions by a special vow to the pope, the Jesuits were aware of the need to produce and show the results of their engagement and to publish them, as the use of the printing press was gaining ground, for their European sponsors and benefactors.
The absence of literature on Indian civilization in European languages stimulated the production of historiography. These histories were meant to be read widely to edify European audiences and entice new recruits and provide the template for missionary action. They were both apologetic and factual, since each detail, whether about missionary successes, obstacles, or martyrdoms, was seen as a step forward to the ultimate triumph. This teleological colouring of the historiographical account was also closely interwoven with Catholic providentialism.
The earliest publications of missionary letters from India, such as the famous Copie d’une lettre missive envoyée des Indes (Paris, 1545) by Francis Xavier, can be taken as the first Jesuit historiographical effort at printing primary sources. (2)
Letters by the missionaries in India, working exclusively under the Portuguese Padroado (the royal patronage of the missions), appeared in print in the sixteenth century, often simultaneously in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, and Latin. What the Portuguese publications called simply Cartas (Letters), written mostly in Portuguese by the Jesuit missionaries with first-hand knowledge, were renamed histories when translated. The New Historical Reports (Nova relatio historica or Newe Historische Relation) or New Indian Relations (Indische Newe Relation) signal a transitional genre between letters (a witness report) and history. The printing press was therefore accelerating the process of making recent present events into fixed past, controlled by the Jesuit imprimatur. (3)
An unpublished history by a missionary in India is História do Malavar (History of Malabar) by Diogo Gonçalves (d.1640). The manuscript that Joseph Wicki dated to around 1615 is not simply a history of the Society of Jesus but a combination of geography and an ethnography of Kerala. (4) It seems to have been written for the Portuguese colonial administration in order to provide strategic advice for a possible conquest of or at least an attack on one of the rich temples. It was also directed at the Jesuit missionaries, offering them information and instructions on how to respond to Indian idolatry and customs.
Jesuit Indian early modern historiography reached its apogee in Daniello Bartoli’s (1608–85) multivolume oeuvre on the History of the Society of Jesus, published in Rome in Italian and Latin between 1650 and 1673 and republished many times over in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His Asian history, separate from those of Japan and China, included Xavier’s life and travel all the way to the mission at the Mughal court by Rodolfo Acquaviva (1550–83) and his martyrdom in Salcette in 1583. The Jesuits in France were bracing for a fight against articulate enemies at home, some of whom came straight from the Jesuit colleges and who were eventually associated with the Enlightenment. (5)
To win over the French literary public, the missionaries in India produced erudite and descriptive texts and letters in which distant peoples and their histories were variously portrayed as congealed in ancient (European) times or as people who “forgot” (or were tricked into forgetting) their own "Christian origins". Jesuit speculations about connections between Brahmins and Jews and many other conjectures were incorporated into some of the most important Enlightenment projects such as Bernard and Picard’s, Cérémonies et coutumes. (6)
As the opposition to the Society of Jesus grew, everything the Jesuits wrote from the missions was used against them in Protestant historiography. From the early years of the eighteenth century, a rival Christian mission in India, that of the German Pietists from Halle in Tranquebar (Tharangambadi in Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu), a Danish enclave on the Coromandel Coast, started producing their own missionary historiography. Their letters and reports were published from 1708 onwards as Hallesche Berichte and some of them were translated into English and published in Propagation of the Gospel in the East that started appearing in 1709 by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and in various other histories. (7)
The acerbic tongue among the Protestant historians of the early eighteenth century was formerly been Catholic, Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze (1661–1739). He wrote Histoire du christianisme des Indes, a history in which Jesuits, Portuguese and French, figure very prominently side by side with other Portuguese ecclesiastical actors. Croze established a very long history of Christianity in India, preserved by the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, while he portrayed the Jesuits and the Portuguese as those who came to pervert and corrupt the pristine message and this ancient community that had originally resembled a Protestant sect.
Only Jesuit authors wrote about their own history, although in the seventeenth century, some Jesuits extended their contributions to other literary, scholarly, and historiographical projects. As Jesuit and European interest in other people’s pasts grew, although diachrony was often collapsed into ethnography, the Society of Jesus itself became increasingly subject to negative criticism. The apogee of negative assessments occurred in the years leading to and after the suppression of the order. The Jesuit historiography of the Indian Jesuit missions resumed after the restoration of the Society of Jesus and the first missionaries, who all came from France, first to Bengal (1834) and then to Tamil Nadu (1837), and who had to deal with the changed political situation in India, in France, and within the Catholic Church.
However, Jesuits’ obsessive control of their own history was compromised by other historical actors in India in the eighteenth century, in particular by information-hungry British administrators-cum-orientalists. The life of the Jesuit Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680–1747) had been written in Tamil before being translated into English and published in 1840. The British were not interested as much in Beschi’s life as in his work since he was recognized by the budding British orientalists as having been an extraordinary Tamil scholar, grammarian, and poet.
The Jesuit missionary to South India, Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) claimed that he was a Brahmin, with an agenda to convert the brahmins. He came to Cochin and went to Madurai where he behaved like a Brahmin. He wore a white dothi, sandals and a three-stringed thread across his chest. He didn't call the thread poonool, but he said it represented the holy trinity. He encouraged shaving the head and the crest of hair on the head, kudummai.
On 3 June 2022, In an interactive session at a conference in the Slovakian capital Bratislava, Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar said: "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems."
The strong comments by Jaishankar came amid persistent efforts by the European countries to convince India to take a tough position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the argument that New Delhi may face a similar challenge from China in the future.
“In terms of the connection you are making, we have a difficult relationship with China and we are perfectly capable of managing it. If I get global understanding and support, obviously it is of help to me,” Jaishankar said.
“But this idea that I do a transaction – I come in one conflict because it will help me in conflict two. That’s not how the world works. A lot of our problems in China have nothing to do with Ukraine and have nothing to do with Russia. They are predated,” he said.
Jaishankar was asked why he thinks anyone will help New Delhi in case of a problem with China after it did not help others for Ukraine.
“Somewhere Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems. That if it is you, it’s yours, if it is me it is ours. I see reflections of that,” he said.
“There is a linkage today which is being made. A linkage between China and India and what’s happening in Ukraine. China and India happened way before anything happened in Ukraine. The Chinese do not need a precedent somewhere else on how to engage us or not engage us or be difficult with us or not be difficult with us,” he said.
Jaishankar said Europe was also silent on many developments in Asia.
“If I were to take Europe collectively which has been singularly silent on many things which were happening, for example in Asia, you could ask why would anybody in Asia trust Europe on anything at all,” he said.
It was a bold attack on Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism has been defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and development. (1)
In Eurocentric narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its economic and political systems and the quality of life enjoyed by its societies. But for Indians, Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, as it is intimately tied to and constituted in the violence and asymmetry of colonial and imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this diabolism not only possible but also acceptable or justifiable.
Significant critiques of Eurocentrism emerged in the context of post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial and anti-imperial movements. Even so, institutional practices that privilege Eurocentric epistemologies continue to haunt the third world in disturbing ways. Thus, India is reinventing itself, realizing the heinous designs Europe had unleashed on India. At the same time, there were several Indologists in Europe, who had realized that India is the cradle of civilization.
Max Muller and Ralph Griffith translated the Vedas. Monier Williams wrote Hinduism and its Sources. Maurice Bloomfield prepared the monumental Vedic Dictionary, A Vedic Concordance. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the poem, Brahma. German scholars translated the Upanishads. The great German poet Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866) wrote a six-volume monumental maha kavya, Brahma Jnanam. (Die Weisheit des Brahmanen, The Wisdom of the Brahmins). Rückert, who had been an expert on Arabic and Persian, also made a name for himself with the translation of the "Mahabharata" legends.
Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam.
The German poet, philosopher and Indologist, Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772-1829), published an epoch-making book in 1808, On the Language and Wisdom of India. (Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier). In the book, he argued that people originating from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. He pointed out, “India is superior in everything — intellectually, religiously, even Greek heritage seems pale in comparison.” In 1818 he became the first professor of Indology at Bonn University.
German philosopher and literary critic Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) remarked: “‘Mankind’s origins can be traced to India where the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the great German philosopher was amazed by the wisdom of the Vedas and reflected: “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and as elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death. They are the product of the highest wisdom. Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.”
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German Romantic poet, essayist and journalist, said: “The Portuguese, Dutch and the English have been for a long time, year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.”
August Wilhelm Schlegel, professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe produced a Latin translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1823. It was the first Sanskrit book printed in Europe. This was the first of a self-financed, self-published series known as ‘The Indian Library’, which also included translations of the Ramayana and the Hitopadesha.
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a Prussian philosopher and diplomat, on reading the Bhagavad Gita, said, “I read the poem for the first time today. I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let me be acquainted with this work. It must be the most sublime thing to be found in the world.”
German Indologist and Philosopher Paul Jakob Deussen (1845-1919) was strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer. He was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and Swami Vivekananda, and even gave himself a Sanskrit name, Deva-Sena, as a mark of his admiration for Hinduism.
Werner Heisenberg (1901- 1976), Nobel Prize winner and co-founder of quantum physics, found revelations in Indian philosophy, and once articulated that “after the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of quantum physics that had seemed crazy suddenly made much more sense”.
But It was the British, who formally created the subject of Indology at the end of the 18th Century when the English scientist William Jones (1746-1794) founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata in 1784. But before that, there was a market for Sanskrit, albeit a small one.
The real beginnings of Sanskrit studies did not really kick off in Germany until the beginning of the 19th century – making Germany the first European country after the British to introduce the subject at universities, where scholars devoted themselves to translating antique religious texts and poetry.
Some of Germany's first Sanskrit scholars were famous personalities, like Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt corresponded with the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with whom he discussed the Bhagavad Gita.
Some works by German philosophers and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche also mention Sanskrit works and are thus proof of the attraction Sanskrit had in Europe.
Academic pursuits of the Germans were focused on the Indian traditional knowledge systems: Metaphysics, Astronomy, Mathematics, Ayurveda, Theosophy, Literature, and Folk traditions. German scholars and missionaries promoted the Indian language with translations and transliterations. The role of the Basel mission in promoting Indian languages like Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, was tremendous.
The contribution of German missionaries to the study of Indian languages, customs, cultural identities and religious practices was part of a European agenda and unsurpassed in the thorough methodology and meticulous documentation. Even though the inadvertent religious bias was always present in their scholastic background, the academic identity they created for Indian languages was highly pedagogic. The German writers had no colonial interest in exploring classical Indian Sanskrit, and their interest in Indian classical literature was purely academic, though it was not the case with missionaries.
The Jesuit agenda
The very first Jesuit mission with the aim of Christianizing India started with the arrival of Francis Xavier (1506–52) in 1542. The Portuguese were the patrons of the Jesuit missions and they called their historiographies on India Estado da Índia. As a new religious order specifically available for overseas missions by a special vow to the pope, the Jesuits were aware of the need to produce and show the results of their engagement and to publish them, as the use of the printing press was gaining ground, for their European sponsors and benefactors.
The absence of literature on Indian civilization in European languages stimulated the production of historiography. These histories were meant to be read widely to edify European audiences and entice new recruits and provide the template for missionary action. They were both apologetic and factual, since each detail, whether about missionary successes, obstacles, or martyrdoms, was seen as a step forward to the ultimate triumph. This teleological colouring of the historiographical account was also closely interwoven with Catholic providentialism.
The earliest publications of missionary letters from India, such as the famous Copie d’une lettre missive envoyée des Indes (Paris, 1545) by Francis Xavier, can be taken as the first Jesuit historiographical effort at printing primary sources. (2)
Letters by the missionaries in India, working exclusively under the Portuguese Padroado (the royal patronage of the missions), appeared in print in the sixteenth century, often simultaneously in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, and Latin. What the Portuguese publications called simply Cartas (Letters), written mostly in Portuguese by the Jesuit missionaries with first-hand knowledge, were renamed histories when translated. The New Historical Reports (Nova relatio historica or Newe Historische Relation) or New Indian Relations (Indische Newe Relation) signal a transitional genre between letters (a witness report) and history. The printing press was therefore accelerating the process of making recent present events into fixed past, controlled by the Jesuit imprimatur. (3)
An unpublished history by a missionary in India is História do Malavar (History of Malabar) by Diogo Gonçalves (d.1640). The manuscript that Joseph Wicki dated to around 1615 is not simply a history of the Society of Jesus but a combination of geography and an ethnography of Kerala. (4) It seems to have been written for the Portuguese colonial administration in order to provide strategic advice for a possible conquest of or at least an attack on one of the rich temples. It was also directed at the Jesuit missionaries, offering them information and instructions on how to respond to Indian idolatry and customs.
Jesuit Indian early modern historiography reached its apogee in Daniello Bartoli’s (1608–85) multivolume oeuvre on the History of the Society of Jesus, published in Rome in Italian and Latin between 1650 and 1673 and republished many times over in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His Asian history, separate from those of Japan and China, included Xavier’s life and travel all the way to the mission at the Mughal court by Rodolfo Acquaviva (1550–83) and his martyrdom in Salcette in 1583. The Jesuits in France were bracing for a fight against articulate enemies at home, some of whom came straight from the Jesuit colleges and who were eventually associated with the Enlightenment. (5)
To win over the French literary public, the missionaries in India produced erudite and descriptive texts and letters in which distant peoples and their histories were variously portrayed as congealed in ancient (European) times or as people who “forgot” (or were tricked into forgetting) their own "Christian origins". Jesuit speculations about connections between Brahmins and Jews and many other conjectures were incorporated into some of the most important Enlightenment projects such as Bernard and Picard’s, Cérémonies et coutumes. (6)
As the opposition to the Society of Jesus grew, everything the Jesuits wrote from the missions was used against them in Protestant historiography. From the early years of the eighteenth century, a rival Christian mission in India, that of the German Pietists from Halle in Tranquebar (Tharangambadi in Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu), a Danish enclave on the Coromandel Coast, started producing their own missionary historiography. Their letters and reports were published from 1708 onwards as Hallesche Berichte and some of them were translated into English and published in Propagation of the Gospel in the East that started appearing in 1709 by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and in various other histories. (7)
The acerbic tongue among the Protestant historians of the early eighteenth century was formerly been Catholic, Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze (1661–1739). He wrote Histoire du christianisme des Indes, a history in which Jesuits, Portuguese and French, figure very prominently side by side with other Portuguese ecclesiastical actors. Croze established a very long history of Christianity in India, preserved by the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, while he portrayed the Jesuits and the Portuguese as those who came to pervert and corrupt the pristine message and this ancient community that had originally resembled a Protestant sect.
Only Jesuit authors wrote about their own history, although in the seventeenth century, some Jesuits extended their contributions to other literary, scholarly, and historiographical projects. As Jesuit and European interest in other people’s pasts grew, although diachrony was often collapsed into ethnography, the Society of Jesus itself became increasingly subject to negative criticism. The apogee of negative assessments occurred in the years leading to and after the suppression of the order. The Jesuit historiography of the Indian Jesuit missions resumed after the restoration of the Society of Jesus and the first missionaries, who all came from France, first to Bengal (1834) and then to Tamil Nadu (1837), and who had to deal with the changed political situation in India, in France, and within the Catholic Church.
However, Jesuits’ obsessive control of their own history was compromised by other historical actors in India in the eighteenth century, in particular by information-hungry British administrators-cum-orientalists. The life of the Jesuit Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680–1747) had been written in Tamil before being translated into English and published in 1840. The British were not interested as much in Beschi’s life as in his work since he was recognized by the budding British orientalists as having been an extraordinary Tamil scholar, grammarian, and poet.
The Jesuit missionary to South India, Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) claimed that he was a Brahmin, with an agenda to convert the brahmins. He came to Cochin and went to Madurai where he behaved like a Brahmin. He wore a white dothi, sandals and a three-stringed thread across his chest. He didn't call the thread poonool, but he said it represented the holy trinity. He encouraged shaving the head and the crest of hair on the head, kudummai.
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| Nobili |
Nobili was an Italian Jesuit who believed local customs are not contrary to Christianity. Born in Tuscany, he came to Goa in 1605. After a short stay in Cochin, he reached Madurai in November. Claiming Brahmin parentage, he approached Brahmins. From a teacher, Shivadharma, he learned Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu. He applied Tamil equivalents to specific Christian terms: Kovil for Church, Arul/prasadam for Grace, Guru for the priest, Vedam for Bible and poosai for mass. Fellow Jesuit and the Arch Bishop of Goa, Cristovao de Sa e Lisboa didn't like his methods and there was a huge controversy. Pope Gregory XV stepped in and settled it-dothi, sandals and the thread got the nod of approval. Nobili died in Mylapore. Though his mission was not a success, he was later acclaimed by Max Muller, as the "first European Sanskrit scholar, a man who could quote from Manu, from the Puranas, and even from the works such as the Apastamba-sutras, which are known even at present to only a few Sanskrit scholars." There is no basis for Muller's assertion, though. It is claimed that he wrote many Sanskrit books, which perished in a fire that burned down his little hermitage when the soldiers came to seize him in 1640. He was imprisoned for two years.
Based on Nobili's Apology (1615), Dr W Caland asserts that Nobili knew the "Sanskrit in Grantha, not in Devanagari characters." (8)
Roth Writes a Sanskrit Grammar book
The first German scholar of Sanskrit was the Jesuit missionary Heinrich Roth (1620-1668). He became fluent during his stay in India. Roth became the first to write a grammar on the language, which, according to history, was never published, as Roth never managed to find the time to oversee the printing process.
Roth won a name in the west as the author of the first Sanskrit Grammar ever written in a European language. He is also known to have done preparatory work for a Sanskrit-Latin Dictionary based upon Veni Datta's Pancha Tattva Prakasa (CE 1664) and to have drawn up a preliminary system of reproducing Hindi words in Roma characters.
He was born in Germany, but died in Agra in India; also known as Henricus Rodius or Henrique Roa, (9) he was a missionary. Having been born in Dillingen and raised in Augsburg, where his father Konrad Roth (died 1637) worked as a lawyer for the Prince-Bishopric, from 1635 to 1639. His mother Maria Susanna was a homemaker.
Roth studied Rhetoric and Humanities at the University of Dillingen and Philosophy at the Jesuit college in Innsbruck. In 1639, he became a Jesuit in Landsberg, and from 1641 to 1645 taught at the grammar schools of Munich, and Ingolstadt, where he served as a master in the lower grades. After that, he returned to Dillingen to start theological studies, which he completed in Ingolstadt in 1649. The same year, he was ordained priest in Eichstätt, in minor orders by the Suffragan Bishop of Freising, Johann Fiernhamer in 1642 and in holy orders by the Prince Bishop of Eichstatt, Marquard II Schenk von Castell, in 1649.
On behalf of Francesco Piccolomini, in 1649 Roth was assigned to the so-called Ethiopian mission to India. (10) Travelling by the land route via Smyrna (1650) and Isfahan, he arrived in Goa by 1652. He worked first on the Island of Salsette off Goa, where from time to time he acted as a Portuguese interpreter. He was then sent to an embassy by one of the native princes, and via Uttarakhand finally reached the Mughal Empire and its residence in Agra in 1654. Acting as rector of the Jesuit residence in Agra since 1659, he was involved in the persecution under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.
Next to learning Persian, Kannada and Hindi, Roth at Agra for several years also acquired a profound knowledge of classical Sanskrit grammar and literature from local pandits. The French explorer and philosopher Francois Bernier, who got acquainted with Roth in these years, got to appreciate him as one versed in expert knowledge of the culture and philosophy of religions in India. (11)
In 1662, joined by fellow Jesuit Johann Grueber, who was on his way back from China, Roth revisited Europe by the land route via Kabul and arrived in Rome in February 1664. Athanasius Kircher, in his monumental work China Illustrata, published their itinerary, Roth’s description of the Sanskrit alphabet, and some short excerpts of Roth’s other works. (12) Travelling north to Germany, Roth held some public lectures in Neuburg on the history and culture of the Mughal Empire, excerpts of which subsequently appeared in print. (13) In Vienna, Roth succeeded in gaining financial support from emperor Leopold I to have his Sanskrit grammar – the first such work ever compiled by a European, which Roth had completed in Agra by 1660 (14) – appear in print, but the project was stopped by the Jesuit Superior General Giovanni Paolo Oliva.
Ordered by Oliva to set up a Jesuit mission in Nepal, Roth travelled back via Constantinople and Surat, (15) returning to Agra by 1666, where he died in 1668 before he could embark on the Nepalese mission. His gravesite is still visible at the Padri Santos chapel in Lashkarpur, a suburb of Agra.
Heinrich Roth's Sanskrit grammar, which he had completed by 1660 in the Latin language under the title Grammatica Linguae Sanscretanae Brachmanum Indiae Orientalis (the manuscript of which is preserved today at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome) and that was augmented by preliminary studies for a complete Sanskrit-Latin dictionary, made him a pioneering scholar in modern Sanskrit studies in Europe. Further works include studies on Hindi and Devanagari alphabets, on Vedanta and on Vishnu. Also, a total of 35 letters, written by Roth from India and during his travel back to Europe, survive at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.
Apart from Roth, several other European scholars contributed to the symbiosis. They include,
Edward Roemer (1805- 1866): was a student of philosophy who learnt Sanskrit and entered the services of East India Company and came to Calcutta in 1839. By 1842 he became the librarian of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and secretary of the linguistic Department of Bengal in 1847. He became the editor of Bibliotheca Indica, a publication of the Asiatic society. He published Ten Upanishads by 1853 with original transliterations.
Hermann Brockhaus (1806 - 1877): His father had a printing house in Leipzig. He studied oriental languages and took interest in Indian mathematics. He translated the Katha Sarit Sagara into German. It was published in 1839 in Leipzig and Paris. He wanted to know the technical details of mechanically printing Sanskrit in Leipzig.
Being from a family with a publishing and printing background, he was interested in printing Sanskrit books. In 1841 he wrote a treatise on how to print Sanskrit works with Latin alphabet letters.
He studied Oriental languages at the Universities of Leipzig, Göttingen and Bonn where he was a student of August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the founder of German Indology. Afterwards, he spent several years in France and England. In 1839 he was appointed associate professor of oriental languages at the University of Jena, teaching Sanskrit and Hebrew beginning in the summer term of 1840. In 1841 Brockhaus followed an appointment to Leipzig, where in 1848 he was appointed a full professor of ancient Indian language at the university.
Herman Grassman (1809- 1877): A linguist who laid a firm foundation for Rig Vedic studies. He brought out the first German translation of the Rig Veda and the Dictionary of the Vedic Language with 2000 pages. After becoming a member of the American Orientalist Society, he became further involved in deep studies of Indian classical Literature.
Theodor Benfrey (1809-1881): He studied Panchatanthra, the Indian book of fables. It was released in 1859 and became very popular. Motifs and ideas taken from these Indian legends and fables were incorporated into several German and European folk stories.
Benfey was born into a Jewish family in the small town of Nörten, near the city of Göttingen. At the age of 16, Benfey began his studies at the University of Göttingen, where he studied Greek and Latin languages. Benfey started his teaching career that year in the city of Frankfurt, where he worked and lived for two years. He then took up a position in Heidelberg, where he remained for two years as well. These were to be the last paid teaching position that Benfey would have for nearly 14 years. In 1834, he returned to take up a position at his alma mater, the University of Göttingen.
During his first few years lecturing at the University of Gottingen, he had also begun work on a lexicon of Greek roots. It was actually by chance that Benfey was first introduced to Sanskrit: There was a wager made that Benfey could not teach himself Sanskrit in time to review a new translation of a Sanskrit book, a mere four weeks. But Benfey did teach himself the language and was able to review the Latin-Sanskrit edition of the Markandeya Purana for an academic journal. This feat of learning is made all the more impressive by the fact that the only books on Sanskrit available at the time were H. H. Wilson's Sanskrit-English Dictionary, and Monier Monier-Williams's Sanskrit grammar, neither of which were particularly helpful, as they only superficially covered Vedic Sanskrit. The much-deserved promotion to a paid, entry-level "assistant professor" did not come until 1848, and only when Benfey and his family had converted from Judaism to Christian Protestantism.
From this time Benfey's attention was principally given to Sanskrit. In 1848 he became an assistant professor, and published his edition of the Samaveda; in 1852–1854 his Handbuch der Sanskritsprache ("Manual of Sanskrit"), comprising a grammar and chrestomathy; in 1858 his Practical Sanskrit Grammar, afterwards translated into English; and in 1859 his edition of the Panchatantra. At length, in 1862, the growing appreciation of foreign scholars shamed it into making him a full professor, and in 1866 Benfey published the laborious work by which he is on the whole best known, his great Sanskrit-English Dictionary.
Hermann Otto (1815 -1904): German linguist. He brought out the Dictionary of the Sanskrit Language.
Theodor Aufrecht (1821- 1907): He was known for his great compilation of all Sanskrit manuscripts published by 1902. (16) He was the first Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at the University of Edinburgh and subsequently spent two decades as a Professor of Indology at the University of Bonn. Aufrecht was born in Leschnitz, Prussian Silesia, into a Jewish family; he later adopted Christianity. He was educated at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, graduating in 1847, in which year he also published a treatise on Sanskrit accent (De Accentu Sancritico, Bonn, 1847), originally his dissertation.
In 1852 he moved to Oxford to assist Max Muller in preparation of his edition of Rig Veda with Sāyaṇa's commentary. He studied at the Bodleian Library and prepared a catalogue of its collection of Sanskrit manuscripts. From 1862 until 1875, he was a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he occupied the newly established chair of Sanskrit and comparative philology. In 1875, Aufrecht was appointed to the chair of Indology at the University of Bonn and remained in that post until 1889. Between 1891 and 1903, he published a three-volume alphabetical catalogue of all Sanskrit manuscript collections known at the time, in a work titled, Catalogus Catalogorum. This was the first such attempt to catalogue all Indian manuscripts, built on Aufrecht's previous catalogues of Sanskrit manuscripts of libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge (1869), Florence (1892), Leipzig (1901), and München (1909).
George Buhler (1837-1898): He is known for the translation of Manusmriti, published in 1886. Born in Hanover, he studied at Gottingen and received a doctorate in eastern languages, in 1856. That same year he went to Paris to study Sanskrit manuscripts, and from 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.
He was a nominated professor of oriental languages at Elphinstone College, Mumbai, and became an education inspector of Gujarat and Sanskrit manuscripts at Bombay presidency. He spent his free time deciphering the edicts of Asoka. He wrote books on Jainism in 1887 which were published in Vienna. (17) He was interested in learning Brahmi script. He published the oldest Prakrit books in Germany. His most significant work was on the origin of the Kharoshthi script. Another publication was Digest on Hindu Laws, which contained several types of law citations. His monumental work of translations of the Apasthambha Dharma Sutra appeared in the Sacred Books of the East compiled by Max muller.
In 1880 he returned to Europe and taught as a professor of Indian philology and archaeology at the University of Vienna, where he worked until the end of his life. On 8 April 1898 Bühler drowned in Lake Constance, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Contemporary accounts mostly attributed it to an accident, but it has been speculated that it was a suicide motivated by Bühler's connections to a scandal involving his former student Alois Anton Führer. (18)
In Germany, a Sanskrit chair was established in 1816 as Franz Bopp propounded the theory of common ancestry for Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages. This theory led to the evolution of common Philology theory.
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1. J. Sundberg, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009
2. For the full list of these early letters see John Correia-Afonso, Jesuit Letters and Indian History: A Study of the Nature and Development of the Jesuit Letters from India (1542–1773) and Their Value for Indian Historiography (Bombay: Indian Historical Research Institute, St. Xavier’s College, 1955)
3. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume III: A Century of Advance (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1986–93
4. Diogo Gonçalves, História do Malavar, ed. Joseph Wicki (Münster: Aschenforffshe Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1955. Quoted in The Jesuit Historiography of the Jesuit Missions in India by Ines G. Županov, https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/jesuit-historiography-online/the-historiography-of-the-jesuit-missions-in-india-15001800-COM_192579
5. Sylvia Murr, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire: L’indologie du père Coeurdoux, vol. 2 (Paris: EFEO, 1987), quoted in G Supanov's article.
6. Amsterdam: J.F. Bernard, 1723–37, quoted in Supanov
7. Propagation of the Gospel in the East: Being an Account of the Success of Two Danish Missionaries, Lately Sent to the East-Indies for the Conversion of the Heathens in Malabar (London: J. Downing, 1709)
8. Acta Orientalia,3 (1926) pp.38-51
9.Vogel, Clause, Heinrich Roth, NDB 22, 2005, p. 106.
10.Instructio A.R.P. Generalis Francisci Piccolomini pro P(atre) Henrico R(oth) Ingolstadio ad missionem Aethiopicam profecturo (1639); cf. Anton Huonder, Deutsche Jesuitenmissionare des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Freiburg, 1899, pp. 213 sq. (German)
11. Bernier mentions Roth several times in his Voyage dans les États du Grand Mogol, Paris, 1671 (cf. the English translation in Travels in Hindustan, new ed., Calcutta, 1904, pp. 109.)
12. Athanasius Kircher: China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis nec non variis naturae et artis spectaculis aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata. Amsterdam 1667; pp. 91 sqq. (Iter ex Agra Mogorum in Europam ex relatione PP. Joh(anni) Gruberi et H(enrici) Roth) and pp. 156-162 (Itinerarium St. Thomae Apost. ex Judaea in Indiam and Dogmata varia fabulossissima Brachmanorum); cf. also Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, London, 1866, p. 277.
13. Relatio rerum notabilium Regni Mogor in Asia, Straubing, 1665, and Aschaffenburg, 1668 (which contains the first information concerning Kabul to reach Europe)
14. Arnulf Camps, Studies in Asian Mission History 1956-1998, Leiden/Boston/Köln, 2000, pp. 75-104 (partly German).
15. Claus Vogel, An old letter from Surat written by German Jesuit Heinrich Roth. In: Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 58, 1987, pp. 609-619.
16. Heather Jane Sharkey - Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary in Middle East Africa & South Asia, 2013.
17. Missionary Pedagogy and Christianization of the Heathens: The Educational Institutions Introduced by the Basel Mission in Mangalore. German Contributions to the Study of Indian regional languages and Sanskrit official website 2014.
18. Charles Allen (2010), The Buddha and Dr Führer: An Archaeological Scandal, Penguin Books India, pp. 173–176
Other references:
1. Hosten, Jesuit Missionaries in Northern India, 1580-1803 (Calcutta, 1906), p 30
2. Balfour, Encyclopedia of India (London, 1885)
3. Ravi N C, Linking Languages Through Missions: The German Scholarship Towards Indian Pedagogy, International Journal of Academic Research, vol 2, issue 2 (5), April -June 2015
4. German Contributions to the Study of Indian regional languages and Sanskrit official website 2014.
5. Arnulf Camps, The Sanskrit Grammar and Manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth S. J. (1620–1668). Introduction. The History of his Sanskrit Manuscripts. in Arnulf Camps- Studies in Asian mission history, 1956-1998, Leiden/Boston/Koln, 2000
6. Missionary pedagogy and Christianization of the heathens: The educational institutions introduced by the Basel Mission in Mangalore, Indian Economic & Social History Review December 2008 45: 509-551.
© Ramachandran
