THE MARCH OF BHAGAVAD GITA IN THE WEST

Charles Wilkins and His English Gita

Walt Whitman, the great American contemporary of Max Muller, never set foot in the sacred soil of India. But when Whitman died, a translation of the Bhagavad Gita was found lying under his pillow. (1)

In 1866, the transatlantic undersea cable was laid, linking the United States with England for telegraphic communication. In 1869 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines were joined in Utah with a golden spike to complete the transcontinental railway across North America. The same year, the Suez canal was opened. In 1871, Walt Whitman celebrated this human conquest in his poem, Passage to India. (2)

Why India? In Whitman’s vision, the great fables and spiritual truths are embodied in India. He hoped that the great modern feats will bring the ancient worlds into his modern American world, or enable his embodied soul to journey back to ancient India. Whitman suggested that these great unifications of space and time are God’s plan: Passage O soul to India!

Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.

Not you alone, proud truths of the world
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science,
But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables
The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,
The deep diving bibles and legends,
The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;
O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun!

Passage to India!
Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

Whitman

Whitman did not mention the Bhagavad Gita by name in Passage to India, but it was one of the "Asian bibles" that he had in mind. He recorded that in preparation for composing Leaves of Grass, he read “the ancient Hindoo poems,” and when the first edition of Leaves was published, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that it read like “a mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald.” 

The Bhagavad Gita was already in New York, for Whitman, well before the 1860s.

First translated into English in 1785, the Bhagavad Gita gained the title, the “Hindu Bible,” and figured prominently in European discourse about Hinduism. In a period of European expansionism, Gita frequently took on a contemporary political valence.

The globalizing processes that brought the Gita to Europe and the United States at the end of the eighteenth century also brought living Hindu teachers by the end of the nineteenth. Starting with Swami Vivekananda’s appearance in Chicago at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, Indian gurus preached to Western audiences about Hinduism, adopting the Bhagavad Gita as their main text. 

For the young Whitman, in the 1840s and 1850s, there were several translations of ancient Hindu poems available in the Astor Library (a precursor of the New York Public Library). Among them was the English translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins, published in London in 1785. The Gita was the first work of classical Sanskrit translated directly into English, and its appearance opened a stream of texts from ancient India onto the intellectual shores of Europe, including the Hitopadesha (1787), Shakuntala (1789), Gita Govinda (1792), and the Laws of Manu (1794). 

These works caused a sensation in Europe, and also created waves across the Atlantic to make a powerful impact on Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Whitman. But Wilkins’s work depended on the establishment of British colonial rule in eastern India, which brought the young Wilkins into contact with learned Indian Brahmins.

A 21-year-old Wilkins sailed from England to Calcutta in 1770, to take up an appointment with the East India Company as a Printer and “writer” or junior clerk. (3)

Born in Somerset, Charles Wilkins (1749 – 1836), the English typographer and supervised Panchanan Karmakar to create one of the first Bengali typefaces. (4) In 1784, Wilkins helped William Jones establish the Asiatic Society of Bengal.  He stayed in India for 16 years (1770–1786). 

Trained as a printer and reaching India, he created the first type for printing Bengali. (5) He published the first typeset book in the language and designed types for Persian. In 1781, he was appointed as a translator of Persian and Bengali to the Commissioner of Revenue and as superintendent of the Company's press. He translated a royal inscription in Kutila characters, which were hitherto indecipherable. Inscriptions of the 6th century CE Brahmi script were deciphered in 1785 by Wilkins, publishing a translation of the Gopika Cave Inscription written by the Maukhari king Anantavarman. (6)

Political Gita

In 1772, Warren Hastings was appointed as the new governor-general for Bengal, assigned with reforming corrupt Company practices. After arriving in Calcutta, he recommended that the British should seek to govern the territories under its control, according to the local laws and customs. 

Hastings’s proposal was the founding of Indology, for it led the British administrators of Bengal to the study of Sanskrit. The administrators were informed that the laws of the Hindu population were contained in codebooks called Dharmashastras, in Sanskrit and promoted by Brahmin scholars or “pundits.” Hastings persuaded the local pundits of Bengal to collaborate with British Company officials in compiling and translating the legal codes. The decision of some pundits to cooperate with the British opened the way for a few Englishmen to study Sanskrit.

Wilkins proved to be the most adept in his pursuit of Sanskrit. Around 1778, he later recalled, “my curiosity was excited by the example of my friend, Mr Halhed [Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, who had tried unsuccessfully to learn Sanskrit], to commence the study of Sanskrit. I was so fortunate as to find a Pandit of a liberal mind, sufficiently learned to assist me in the pursuit.” (7)

By 1783, Wilkins made enough progress in his Sanskrit studies to begin translating the epic Mahabharata. He requested a leave of absence from his administrative duties in Calcutta, on health grounds, to travel to Benares, the centre of traditional Hindu learning. Wilkins was “Sanskrit-mad,” as the Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke later described his affliction. With Hastings’s support, the Company granted the leave, and in early 1784 Wilkins relocated to Benares. There he met and worked with the pundit Kashinatha Bhattacharya. (8)

There were no Sanskrit-English dictionaries or grammar in any European language. Kashinatha himself compiled two such fundamental works for his British patrons Wilkins and William Jones: a list of Sanskrit verb roots and a ten-thousand-word vocabulary. Wilkins’s choice to translate the Bhagavad Gita of the Mahabharata reflects the value that his Brahmin pundits placed on the work. “The Brahmans esteem this work to contain all the grand mysteries of their religion,” wrote Wilkins in his preface. 

“Translation is treason,” goes the adage, and no translation is transparent. 

Wilkins made no attempt to reproduce the metrical verse, of the Sanskrit Gita in his translation. He rendered it in prose dialogue, though with enough King Jamesian “thees” and “thous” to suggest a bible-like authority. He recognized that his translation will not be entirely clear to English readers. He blamed this on what he saw as the obscurity of the original.

Wilkins

It was the translator’s duty to remove as much of this obscurity as his knowledge would permit. This Wilkins has attempted in his Notes, but as he is conscious they are still the text is but imperfectly understood by the most learned Brahmans of the present; and that, small as the work may appear, it has more comments than the Revelations. (9)

More interesting is Wilkins’s judgment of the broader significance of the Bhagavad Gita. He does not give any indication that he might see the application of Krishna’s teachings to his own life, as medieval Indian commentators had. Rather, Wilkins locates the intention of the author as one of religious reform within Hinduism.

It seems as if the principal design of the Gita was to unite the prevailing modes of worship; the design was to induce men to believe God was present in every image before which they bent, and the object of all their ceremonies and sacrifices. (10)

He viewed the Gita as a historical document, valuable for the insight that it may yield about the early development of the Hindu religion. This in turn may help his compatriots in understanding contemporary Hindu beliefs and practices, as part of a larger British project to comprehend the practices of their new colonial subjects, in order better to rule them. As William Jones, his fellow Orientalist, put it, “[Those who wish to] form a correct idea of Indian religion and literature” should start by forgetting “all that has been written on the subject, by ancients or moderns, before the publication of the Gita.” (11)

In October 1784 Hastings visited Benares on political business, and Wilkins showed him the Gita translation. Hastings was delighted. As he wrote in a letter to his wife, “My friend Wilkins has lately made me a present of a most wonderful work of antiquity, and I am going to present it to the public.” (12) By “public” Hastings meant the British public. He sent the manuscript by ship from Calcutta to London with a lengthy letter of recommendation addressed to his superior, Nathaniel Smith, chair of the East India Company board of directors. 

Hastings proposed that the Company publish this “specimen of the Literature, the Mythology, and Morality of the ancient Hindoos.” To justify publication to the Company directors, Hastings argued that such learning held great value for the exercise of British colonial rule. “Every accumulation of knowledge,” he wrote, “and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state.” (13) For Hastings and the East India Company, the translation of the Bhagavad Gita was a political act.

In May 1785, the work was printed under the title The Bhagavat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon; in Eighteen Lectures, with Notes, translated from the Sanskrit by Wilkins. There is no mention of Kashinatha in the publication. In the “advertisement” that followed the title page of the book, the work is set forward, as “one of the greatest curiosities ever presented to the literary world.” 

From the first appearance of Wilkins’s rendering of the Bhagavad Gita, followed by other seminal translations from Sanskrit, European savants looked to these ancient works with avid excitement. Wilkins’s translation was quickly rendered into Russian and French, and a few years later into German. It was the time when the romantic movement was taking form in Europe, and an exuberant image of India would hold an important position in the romantic sensibility.

The most enthusiastic reception took place in Germany. (14) Even before any Sanskrit works had appeared in Europe, the theologian Johann Gottfried Herder was portraying India as the cradle of civilization. Of the four ages of humankind, Herder speculated, the “childhood” of the human race took place in Asia, and he postulated that the inception of human culture must have occurred near the Ganges River.

Inspired by Herder, the poet Novalis located the Garden of Eden somewhere in the Himalayas. India’s language was more ancient, its mythology was older than any other, and wisdom itself seemed to have arisen on the Indian subcontinent.  Friedrich von Schlegel proclaimed to his friend Ludwig Tieck, “Here is the actual source of all languages, all the thoughts and poems of the human spirit; everything, yes, everything without exception has its origin in India.” (15) 

All these metaphors situated India, as the site of the primordial, in contrast to the European modern. For the German romantics, the primordial held a compelling promise. They valued it as natural and pure, as opposed to the fractured and disenchanted reality of their contemporary European culture. In this reverse teleology, true perfection lay at the very infancy of human culture. The original state of things could offer a critical perspective toward the present, an antidote to European traditions that these romantics viewed as moribund.

As it travelled from Benares to Calcutta to London to Germany, Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita landed in an intellectual field that was richly prepared for this old Indian gem. If the first stage of the human career took place in India, then Sanskrit works like the Gita could open a window into this ancient spiritual purity. The first incarnations of the Bhagavad Gita in the German language were secondary translations derived from Wilkins’s English version. Herder translated portions of the poem, along with two other Indian texts, in his Zerstreute Blätter (Scattered Leaves) of 1792. This Sanskrit works confirmed his great enthusiasm for all things Indian. But in rendering Gita’s thoughts, Herder extracted them from their textual setting and resituated them, along with excerpts from translations of the Hitopadesha and Bharthruhari’s poetry, as epigrams in a topical scheme of his own devising.

The Gita, Herder declared, presents the tremendous unitary premise of pantheism: One in all, and all into One. All humans are quickened by the one World Spirit, and we should use our brief period of life to its best effect through reflection and conscientious actions. Humans ought to be led by reason, not by delusion or aversion. Truth, not error, should govern humanity. In contrast to Wilkins, Herder is not concerned with the history of Hinduism. Rather, in his view, Krishna speaks from the dawn of human culture to address perennial human concerns.

One of Herder’s followers, Friedrich Maier, rendered the entire Bhagavad Gita from Wilkins’s translation into German in 1802. While Maier located the Gita as one of the earliest expressions of the Hindu intellect, he also pointed to the analogies between many of its ideas and those of Plato, Benedict de Spinoza, and the Christian mystic Jacob Boehme. Other early European readers of the Gita similarly observed that the ancient Indian poet seemed to have anticipated and first articulated many tenets found in later Western philosophical or theological traditions. The French translator Jean-Denis Lanjuinais saw many such parallels. “It was a great surprise,” he remarked, “to find among these fragments of an extremely ancient epic poem from India, along with the system of metempsychosis, a brilliant theory on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, all the sublime doctrines of the Stoics, the pure love which bewildered Fénelon, a completely spiritual pantheism, and finally the vision of all-in-God upheld by Malebranche.” (16) If India was the birthplace of human civilization, as the early romantic vision had it, then the Bhagavad Gita as one of its earliest written expressions could serve as the original wisdom book.

“We must seek the supreme romanticism in the Orient,” declared Friedrich Schlegel in 1800. Fired by his passion to discover a source of human wisdom that could restore European culture, Schlegel took up the study of Sanskrit in 1802. He was the first Westerner to learn Sanskrit without travelling to India. His pundit was a retired British army officer and Orientalist, Alexander Hamilton, who had studied the language during his service in Calcutta. Hamilton was now in Paris cataloguing the collection of Indian manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale. At the time, Scotsman Hamilton was the only person in continental Europe who knew Sanskrit, and he generously aided Schlegel. (17)

By 1808 Schlegel issued the conclusions of his Indological studies, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag zur Begrûndung der Alterthumskunde, (On the Language and wisdom of the Indians: A Contribution to the Foundation of Antiquity), a lengthy comparative study of Indian language and philosophy. As an appendix to his book, he included direct translations from Sanskrit into German of extracts from the Bhagavad Gita and other important classical Indic texts. 

In his preface, Schlegel honours Wilkins, Jones, Hamilton, and other pioneers in the Western study of the Orient, and envisions the immense role such research can play in reinvigorating European thought:

"The study of Indian literature requires to be embraced by such students and patrons as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries suddenly kindled in Italy and Germany an ardent appreciation of the beauty of classical learning, and in so short a time invested it with such prevailing importance, that the form of all wisdom and science, and most of the world itself, was changed and renovated by the influence of that re-awakened knowledge. I venture to predict that the Indian study if embraced with equal energy, will prove no less grand and universal in its operation, and have no less influence on the sphere of European intelligence." (18)

Just as the rediscovery of Greek and Latin classics had provoked a renaissance in European intellectual life, so Schlegel predicts the study of Indian classics can catalyze a second and more profound rebirth—an “Oriental renaissance,” as it would be later termed by Edgar Quinet and Raymond Schwab.

Expanding on the suggestions of Nathaniel Halhed, Jones, and others as to the lexical parallels between Sanskrit and other languages, Schlegel examined the grammatical systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, and demonstrated striking similarities among them. His linguistic work would inspire others like Franz Bopp, who went on to establish the discipline of historical philology, one of the seminal intellectual fields of the nineteenth century. Schlegel's study of Indian languages also inspired his older brother, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, to move to Paris and study Sanskrit.

In the appendix to Sprache und Weisheit, Schlegel rendered about one-fifth of the Gita in metrical German. The pattern of his selections and omissions is significant. Schlegel avoids Krishna’s instructions to Arjuna about work and duty and also omits the teachings pertaining to the yoga of devotion. Much of the battlefield landscape drops out, as does Arjuna’s vision of Krishna in his all-encompassing form. Instead, Schlegel highlights passages concerning the intellectual concept of the godhead and the human quest to find union with the divine. Schlegel’s abbreviated Gita is focused on a jnana yoga interpretation.

But Schlegel’s own initial enthusiasm for ancient Indian literature as a direct source of wisdom waned over the course of his studies. He joined the Catholic Church in 1808, the same year that Sprache und Weisheit was published. We do not know whether any colonial power centre was behind his re-conversion. From then on, he did not pursue any further studies of Sanskrit or Indian philosophy.

Hegel

Within his newfound Catholicism, Schlegel had to find a way to locate the "lesser wisdom" of Indian works like the Gita. The earliest Indians, he proclaimed, had possessed knowledge of the true God. A primordial “glance” of revelation had fallen on India. In the course of time, however, this original wisdom had been overlaid with “a fearful and horrible superstition.” Thus Indian religious thought followed a downward trajectory: the initial diffusion of the pure revelation degenerated in the direction of idolatry, astrology, and other Hindu abominations. In an early text like the Bhagavad Gita, Schlegel believed, glimmers of that ancient light of divine wisdom still could be glimpsed amid the unwieldy growth of "erroneous" mythology that had come to constitute Hinduism. The virtue of the Gita resulted from its antiquity along with its proximity to an original revelation, and Schlegel’s selective translation highlighted the remnants of that divine manifestation. Yet unlike Hinduism, Catholicism had managed to preserve this revelation in its true form, he imagined.

Several divergent pathways proceeded from his studies of 1808, and it marks a significant moment of transition in the European study of the Bhagavad Gita and other classical Sanskrit works.  The romantic impulse with which Schlegel commenced his Sanskrit study continued, despite his own disappointed abdication. It took on a lively new incarnation across the Atlantic among the postcolonial transcendentalists in the United States like Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (all enthusiastic readers of Wilkins’s translation of the Gita), and Whitman. Thoreau took a borrowed copy of the Wilkins Gita with him to Walden Pond, where he imagined himself communing with a Brahmin priest on the Ganges as he sat reading at the pond bank. (19)

The nineteenth-century scientific study of Sanskrit and ancient Indian literature, in which German savants like Bopp and Schlegel's brother Wilhelm excelled, developed from Schlegel’s comparative linguistic work and pioneering efforts at translation. In 1818, Wilhelm became the first academic professor of Sanskrit in Germany, at the University of Bonn. In 1823, he published his complete translation of the Gita, not into German, but into Latin, to give the old text the aura of a "proper" classic. Between 1800 and 1823, the “supreme romanticism” that inspired the younger Friedrich had been supplanted by a new disciplinary ethos of Indology. India's ancient literature offers scholars a new object for philological research.

Colonial Gita

Schlegel pioneered the kind of critical reading that nineteenth-century Christians and missionaries working in India would give to Gita: find the “good parts” that adhere to Christian doctrine and dismiss the remainder as superstition. (20) This fitted with a broader colonial and Christian narrative of India’s "historical degeneration", which would take firm root, especially in British and Marxist colonial discourse, as we see in the 33 articles written by Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune.

Thus, some readings are less innocent than others. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, those who read the Bhagavad Gita did so in a political context. The political issue was how the British were best to govern the new colonial territories on the subcontinent by conquest. The Bhagavad Gita and other works translated from Sanskrit were taken as evidence for forming a British perspective about India.

Warren Hastings and others in his circle believed that British engagement in learning about India would aid the colonial enterprise by conciliating differences between rulers and ruled. So, he wrote to the Company chair, advocating the publication of the Gita translation:

"It is not very long since the inhabitants of India were considered by many [in England], as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life; nor, I fear, is that prejudice yet wholly eradicated, though surely abated. Every instance which brings their real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained in their writings: and these will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance." (21)

It was the British attitude toward India that needed to change, according to Hastings, to wriggle out the differences between the two peoples. He argued that reading the Gita would help the British public overcome its prejudice about Indian savagery,  Hastings closed with a prescient estimation of the relative duration of British rule and the life of Indian writings like the Bhagavad Gita.

Hastings’s generous strategy generated fierce opposition. The most vicious attacks came from two quarters. Evangelist Christians like Charles Grant and utilitarians like James Mill found a common cause in opposing the Indian orientation. Both emphasized a profound difference between Indian and British societies on an evolutionary “scale of civilization.” In the estimations of Grant and Mill, Indian society was scarcely elevated above savagery.  They argued that the cause of Indian backwardness was not racial but cultural. Indians had been oppressed by their own political and religious despotism. Therefore, the task for the British in India was “assimilation.” They said, assimilation was not required of the British, as Hastings had suggested; it was up to Indians to become more like the British. A transformation of Indian society was needed. On the instruments of transformation, Evangelists advocated a greater role for Christian missionary activity, while utilitarians wanted a secular process of modernization. While both Grant and Mill had influential positions within the East India Company, Mill exerted his influence on British colonial rule with his magnum opus, the History of British India, published in 1818. (22)

Mill, a 32-year-old freelance journalist from Scotland living in London, was struggling to support a growing household of nine children when he began work on his History of British India in 1806. Mill undertook a three-volume historical monograph that would take twelve years to write. He lacked experience living in India and had no training in any Indian language. Nevertheless, when History appeared in 1818, it was a financial success, and the earnings helped sustain his family. The book established Mill as an authority in India, and he won a position with the East India Company in 1819, which he kept for the remainder of his career.

Mill calls his History a “critical history,” by which he means a “judging history.” In the preface he likens himself to a courtroom judge, sifting all the written evidence. He wishes to evaluate the civilizations of the “Hindoos” and “Mahomedans” over which the British have acquired dominion. The items of evidence presented in Mill’s court are the classical Sanskrit works translated into English as well as various reports from travellers and missionaries. All are taken to represent a single Hindu civilization. 

Mill's eldest son, John Stuart Mill, who was subjected to his father’s radical methods of homeschooling during the years that Mill was working on History, described his father’s temper as “constitutionally irritable.” (23) In History, one can hear Mill bringing that irascibility to his evaluation of Hindu texts. His irritation was directed toward a clear political purpose. By demonstrating the "childish backwardness" of Indian society, Mill sought to persuade his British audience of the need for more forceful colonial intervention in Indian life.

Mill claims that religion plays a dominant role in Hindu civilization. “Everything in Hindustan,” he asserts, “was transacted by the Deity…. The astonishing exploits of the Divinity were endless in that sacred land.” Accordingly, Mill’s account of religion forms a central portion of his lengthy book 2, “Of the Hindus.” The Bhagavad Gita figures significantly as a witness in this section of History, along with the Laws of Manu, the Puranas, and missionary descriptions of contemporary Hindu practices. For Mill, the Gita does not exist as a narrative or part of the Mahabharata, and he does not bother with any attempt to comprehend Krishna’s complex teaching as a whole. Rather, the Gita is a source of passages to be excerpted and juxtaposed with passages from other sources, other centuries, and other schools of thought.

In Mill’s view, religion ought to provide a depiction of the cosmos as a perfect system governed by general laws and directed toward benevolent ends. He orders that the Hindus fail grievously on this scale. He writes: “No people, how rude and ignorant so ever, who have been so far advanced as to leave us memorials of their thoughts in writing, have ever drawn a more gross and disgusting picture of the universe, than what is prescribed in the writings of the Hindus.” Mill continues, “All is disorder, caprice, passion, contest, portents, prodigies, violence, and deformity.” (24) At his absurd best, Mill quotes the entire account of Arjuna’s vision of Krishna’s all-encompassing form at Kurukshetra as a “monstrous exhibition” of a guilty cosmology. 

Along with Manu’s prescriptions for the renunciatory stage of life, Mill cites the Gita description of the sthitaprajna, the person whose wisdom is firm, as a proof text., and says that these are the tortures that the religion of the Hindus requires. He misguides his readers, by saying that Hindu yogis are required to renounce all moral duties and affections. Mill is unaware that Krishna’s depiction of the sthitaprajna is explicitly directed toward persons living in the world who wish to employ yogic techniques of self-mastery within their worldly activities. Mill does not mention the advocacy in Krishna’s teachings to Arjuna to observe dharma, moral duty, as a basis for impartial social action.

James Mill

Then Mill concludes about India: “No coherent system of belief seems capable of being extracted from their wild eulogies and legends.”(25) Mill did not seek the widespread Christianization of India, as Grant had, but a secular alignment with his utilitarian values. His position at the East Indian Company later allowed him to enact this agenda within Company policies. While the romantics believed ancient India provides primordial wisdom for benighted Europe, Mill substituted it with the new nineteenth-century faith in the Anglicization of a "rude Indian civilization."

If Indian commentators often highlighted supreme utterances in the Gita as mahavakyas, Mill isolated passages from the text that best supported his pejorative vision of Hinduism. His History of British India became required reading for British personnel training for service in colonial India.

Hegel's Gita 

In Germany, the Bhagavad Gita had a different destiny. As Wilhelm von Schlegel realize, Germans did not have the same political ambition as the British to learn about India. He maintained that Germans did have a “special call to get to the bottom of Indian antiquity.”(26) He called for the application of the philological method and rigour. In the 1820s, Schlegel’s Devanagari edition and Latin translation of the Gita provoked a series of arguments among German savants that would determine the location of Indian antiquity. At stake was the place of India and its classical texts like the Gita in a universal history that nineteenth-century Europe was seeking to construct.

In explaining his choice of the Bhagavad Gita as his first Indic publication, Schlegel described the work as “a famous philosophical poem, praised in the whole of India, whose wisdom and sanctity can hardly be surpassed by any other.” Schlegel’s comment reflected the European desire to find a single key to Indian religious thought through the Gita.

Schlegel’s work in 1823, evoked some of the same fervour that had greeted Wilkins’s English translation four decades earlier. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the diplomat and linguist, wrote to Schlegel of his gratitude to destiny for giving him the opportunity to listen to the Gita in its original language. But the French Sanskritist Alexandre Langlois published a strong criticism of Schlegel’s translation in the new Journal asiatique in 1824. Schlegel’s failure to find single translational terms in Latin for certain crucial Sanskrit terms in the Gita, such as yoga, dharma, and brahman, were the issues.

Humboldt defended his friend Schlegel. In two lectures delivered in 1825 and 1826 at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and later published in the academy’s Proceedings, Humboldt proclaimed the Gita “the most beautiful, presumably the only real philosophical poem of all known works of literature.” (27) Humboldt observed that languages are not structured similarly. An important Sanskrit word like yoga or dharma may have a semantic range that does not correspond precisely to any single term in Latin, German, or any other language. Translators, Humboldt contended, must leave themselves open to the multiple meanings inherent in the original and seek to render that fully. Moreover, he asserted, a work rich in philosophical ideas like the Gita must be approached as an integral whole. He concluded: “I furthermore hold that there is hardly another means to elucidate the numerous dark spots that still remain in Indian mythology and philosophy than to excerpt, one by one, each of the works which can pass as their main sources, and investigate it completely and separately before comparing it with other works.”

Humboldt, who was instrumental in establishing the University of Berlin set the agenda for the scientific, empirical, and philological approach to the study of Indian antiquity pioneered by Schlegel and Bopp. In this, Humboldt was rejecting the reverse teleology of Herder and the romantics, who had looked to ancient India as a source of universal wisdom. He was also challenging the conception of history as the progressive self-manifestation of the Weltgeist or World Spirit, advocated by the Berlin professor of philosophy and guide of Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel challenged Humboldt with two lengthy reviews of Humboldt’s lectures on the Gita, which he published in his Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik (Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit) in 1827. (28)

Hegel’s view was centred on the movement of the remarkable Geist throughout human history. He viewed this as a single world-historical passage across time, connecting all human civilizations both East and West. Hegel shared the romantic premise that civilization had originated in the East. Yet he thought that this was not a privilege, for the East had remained mired in the early stages of the Spirit’s movement. The primordial did not hold a promise of renewal, as the earlier romantics had imagined. As the Spirit spread from East to West, finally reaching Berlin, it had superseded its own earlier forms. But the Spirit stopped in its tracks in India.

Reading the Bhagavad Gita, Hegel tried to demonstrate how its premises had contributed to the stultification of the Spirit in India. Hegel portrayed the Gita as expounding the basic essentials of the Hindu religion. Hegel identified the doctrine of yoga as “the essence of their religion as well as its most sublime concept of God.”

But Hegel’s depiction is much narrower than the explication that Krishna provides in the text. For Hegel, yoga requires withdrawal and isolation from the world, leading to a passive immersion into the brahman. Unlike the Christian God, Hegel contends, the Hindu brahman abdicates its divine obligation to engage in the world process. Hegel thus neglects the fact that Krishna proclaims himself the brahman, personally embodied on a real Indian battlefield, to persuade a warrior to engage in worldly combat. For Hegel, the "static" aspirations of Hinduism articulated in the Gita consigned India to a backward status, lacking the dynamic agency of the West. Hence, India’s political failure, yielding to an easy conquest by the British. It is spiritual inertia. 

Hegel has been never to India, and he had just copied his views on India, from British parliamentary reports. Then Marx plagiarised it from Hegel. About India, Hegel absurdly recorded: "The Hindoos have no history, no growth expanding into a veritable political condition. The diffusion of Indian culture had been a dumb, deedless expansion. The people of India have achieved no foreign conquests, but have on every occasion been vanquished themselves." (29)

Karl Marx copied it: "Indian society has no history, at least no known history. What we call its history of successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society." (30)

unaware of Advaita, Hegel then ridiculed Hinduism thus: "The ideology of the Hindoo culture is a pantheism of imagination, expressed in the universal deification of all finite existence and degradation of the Divine, deprivation of man of personality and freedom...the morality of which is involved in respect of human life is not found among the Hindoos." (31)

Marx repeated: "Murder itself a religious right in Hindoostan-a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow." (32)

Obviously, both Hegel nor Marx had not known that India had moral texts like Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Vivekananda's Gita

Swami Vivekananda proved Hegel wrong by his interpretation of the Gita as an active text. He proved the Geist was moving in new directions that Hegel had not anticipated. The Gita was kept alive through meaningful readings of latter-day European romantics and US transcendentalists. European scholars editing Indian classics began to supply a fuller picture of the history of Indian religious thought and the place of the Gita within it.

New versions began to appear by the latter half of the nineteenth century. The second English translation came in 1855, by J. Cockburn Thomson. The Bhagavad Gita reappeared twice in 1882, translated by John C. Davies and the Indian jurist K. T. Telang, in the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East, edited by Max Müller.

The Gita’s most popular new incarnation was Edwin Arnold’s 1885 poetic rendering, The Song Celestial. Although Arnold intended his work for an English audience, it had its most profound effect on the young Gandhi, studying law in London in the early 1890s. In that same decade, Vivekananda, the first of many Hindu holy men made a passage to the West and began to present the Bhagavad Gita in a new, compelling framework to Western audiences.

In 1893, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and Parsee religious speakers arrived in Chicago, where they represented their faiths to large audiences at the World’s Parliament of Religions, part of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Whitman had died a year earlier. Vivekananda created a wave at the Parliament keeping the Bhagavad Gita as a core text for his presentation.

It was through articles in the Madras newspaper the Hindu, word of the upcoming gathering reached Vivekananda. At the time he was living as a wandering mendicant in southern India. Vivekananda got the idea that travelling to the distant United States and speaking at this parliament might enable him to raise resources to aid in a plan to alleviate poverty in India. With the material support of the Maharaja of Khatri, Vivekananda made the long voyage.

He sailed on a new trans-Pacific ocean liner, the RMS Empress of India, out of Bombay by way of Hong Kong and Japan to disembark in Vancouver, and from there he travelled across the North American continent on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway to Winnipeg, then on the Great Western Railway to Chicago. Arriving six weeks before the Parliament, Vivekananda journeyed to Massachusetts and then briefly reverted to his homeless mode of life on the streets of Chicago after his money ran out until he was found sitting on a curb on North Dearborn Street, in an exclusive residential neighbourhood. Vivekananda was spotted by Ellen Hale the day before the Parliament was to begin. “Sir, are you a representative to the World’s Parliament of Religions?” she asked the exotic-looking visitor and hustled him off to the home of Reverend John Barrows, the chair of the event. (33) Though Vivekananda arrived without any official invitation, his persuasive personal charm enabled him to gain admission as one of the delegates representing Hinduism. Thus, the young Hindu emissary marched in procession into the hall on September 11, 1893, with over sixty other delegates and seated himself on the dais. On the first afternoon of the Parliament, he gave his opening remarks.

Vivekananda

Dressed in orange robes and turban, as soon as Vivekananda greeted the audience, “sisters and brothers of America,” the crowd responded with a tumultuous ovation. The organizers were confident in the superiority of Christianity, in its liberal American Protestant form. Vivekananda immediately laid claim to the virtue of tolerance on behalf of Hinduism. He declared: “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal tolerance, but we accept all religions as true.” This Parliament, he went on, could be seen as a fulfilment of Krishna’s statement in the Bhagavad Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.” (34) The Gita was not a remnant of Indian backwardness or failure, as Mill or Hegel would have it, but rather a work of prescient modernity. The parliament was not a demonstration of Christian superiority but conversely a new pathway by which Americans too could struggle toward Krishna.

A few days later he presented to the Parliament, his “Paper on Hinduism.” The foundation of Hinduism, according to Vivekananda, is the revelation found in the ancient Vedas, and the Bhagavad Gita is the most authoritative commentary on the Vedas. The Vedas proclaim that the spirit, which lives in the body, will go on living after bodily death, through transmigration into another bodily form. The central problem is that the pure and perfect spirit is imprisoned in matter. The aim must be to burst the bondage of matter and thereby enable the spirit to reach its divine perfection. This is the core of the Hindu system.

All this is taught by Krishna, Vivekananda continued, who Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth. Vivekananda quoted Krishna: “I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know that I am there.” As Krishna is present in all religions, salvation is available through many religious paths. One of Gita’s main achievements, according to Vivekananda, is its reconciliation of different paths in classical India. Krishna’s original insight, he observes, was that all these various spiritual disciplines could be seen as valid means to a common end. Vivekananda closed his lecture by endorsing the concept of a universal religion, suggesting it already exists in the form of ancient Hinduism.

In his lecture tour after the Parliament, from the Gita, he stressed two main themes he believed most people in the United States needed. First is Krishna’s tolerance of multiple paths toward spiritual attainment to counter the doctrinal rigidity he perceived in American Christianity of the time. Second was Krishna’s principle of nonattachment to the fruits of action in order to temper the acquisitive materialistic ethos of the American gilded age. Along the way, he made some strong criticisms of Christianity for its missionary practices in India. 

For the select disciples in the United States, he taught private classes on the Gita and the Upanishads and gave instruction in meditation. In 1894 he established the Vedanta Society of New York and a similar society in San Francisco in 1900. These groups of American seekers, instructed by Vivekananda and other swamis from the Ramakrishna Order in India, became the first continuing Hindu organization in the United States. (35)

The swami returned to India in 1897. Vivekananda was welcomed as a hero who had achieved a great victory for Hinduism and India. But he brought back a message that India also had much to learn from the energetic West. In colonial India, he proclaimed, people had become lethargic and needed to recover the virtue of work. As he lectured an assembly in Madras, the Bhagavad Gita already contained this message in its emphasis on socially engaged action or the path of karma yoga. “First of all, our young men must be strong. Religion will come afterwards,” he began. “You will understand the Gita better with your biceps, your muscles a little stronger. You will understand the mighty genius and the mighty strength of Krishna better with a little strong blood in you.” (36) Vivekananda quoted Krishna’s admonition to Arjuna, as a directive to young India: “Yield not to unmanliness, o Partha” (2.3). 

Through his passage, Vivekananda brought some of the “far-darting beams of the spirit” that Whitman celebrated from a land of an elder religion to the New World. Vivekananda in turn praised Whitman as “the sannyasin of America.” (37) At the same time, his success in the United States and effort to establish a more activist form of Hinduism in India, using Krishna’s presentation of karma yoga, contributed to a vital conversation in colonial India. The debate was political and cultural as much as religious: how to create a new, more assertive national ethos as part of the growing movement to gain independence from British control. The Bhagavad Gita played a major role in developing India's national ethos.

____________________________________

1. George Hendrick, “Whitman’s Copy of the Bhagavad-Gita,” Walt Whitman Review 5 (1959): 12–14.

2. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Viking Press, 1959). “Passage to India” was first added to the fifth edition (1871) of Leaves of Grass as an appendix.

3. Mary Lloyd, “Sir Charles Wilkins, 1749–1836), India Office Library and Records Report (1978): 9–39. 

4. Ezra Greenspan; Jonathan Rose (2003). Book History. Penn State Press. p 26, 50.

5. No. VIII, Sir Charles Wilkins, The Annual biography and obituary for the year 1817–1837, p. 69–72. Google Books

6. Salomon, Richard (1998). Indian Epigraphy. p 206-207, Wilkins, Charles (1788). Asiatic Researches. London: Printed for J. Sewell [etc.] pp. 278-281.

7. Charles Wilkins, A Grammar of the Sanskrita Language (London: C. Nourse, 1808), xi. 

8. Charles Wilkins, “A Catalogue of Sanskrita Manuscripts Presented to the Royal Society by Sir William and Lady Jones (1798),” in vol. 13, The Works of Sir William Jones (Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1980).

9. Charles Wilkins, The Bhagavat-Gēētā, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, in Eighteen Lectures; with Notes (London: C. Nourse, 1785), 24–25.

10. Ibid., 24.

11. P. J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1970), 12.

12. Sydney G. Grier, The Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905), 364–65.

13. Warren Hastings, “To Nathaniel Smith, Esquire,” in The Bhagavat-Gēētā, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, ed. Charles Wilkins (London: C. Nourse, 1785), 10.

14. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press). A. Leslie Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964); Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988); Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Vishwa Adluri and Jagdeep Bagchee, The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). K. G. Srivastava, Bhagavad-Gītā and the English Romantic Movement (Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd., 2002).

15. Quoted in Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, 71.

16. ibid., 161.

17. Rosane Rocher, Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824): A Chapter in the Early History of Sanskrit Philology (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1968).

18. Friedrich von Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel, trans. E. J. Millington (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 427.

19. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). On Thoreau and the Gita, see Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Paul Friedrich, The Gita within Walden (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006); Barbara Stoller Miller, “Afterword: Why Did Henry David Thoreau Take theBhagavad-Gita to Walden Pond,” in The Bhagavad-gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, trans. Barbara Stoller Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

20. J. N. Farquhar, Gītā and Gospel (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1917); it portrays the Gītā as “the cry of the Hindu people for an incarnate Saviour” (32). Catherine Cornille, ed., Song Divine: Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gītā (Leuven: Peeters, 2006).

21. Quoted in Wilkins, Bhagavat Gēētā, 13. P. J. Marshall, “Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron,” in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. Anne Bramley J. S. Whiteman and P.G.M. Dickenson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 342–62.

22. James Mill, The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1826). Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

23. Terence Ball, “James Mill,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 38:150.

24. Mill, History of British India, 329–30.

25. Ibid., 283.

26. Herling, The German Gita, 168.

27. Herbert Herring, Introduction to On the Episode of the Mahābhārata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gītā by Wilhelm von Humboldt, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995), xiv–xv.

28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Episode of the Mahābhārata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gītā by Wilhelm von Humboldt, trans. Herbert Herring (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995).

29. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J Sibree, 1956, p 163, Dover Publications, NY

30. Karl Marx, The New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853

31. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p 140, 141, 150

32. Marx, The New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853.

33. Vivekananda’s rendering of Bhagavad Gītā 4.11. For his addresses at the parliament, Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 8 vols. (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1970–73), 1:3–24. Harold W. French, “Swami Vivekananda’s Use of the Bhagavadgita,” in Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, ed. R. N. Minor (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 1986), 131–46.

34. Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

35. Swami Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 60.

36. Vivekananda, “Madras Lecture,” in Complete Works, 3:242.

37.  Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography, 69.

Note: I am greatly indebted to The Bhagavad Gita, A Biography by Richard H Davis, published by Princeton University Press, 2014

© Ramachandran 

KALIDASA'S CONQUEST OF GERMANY

Sakuntalam Conquered Germany

The famous German poet Novalis (Georg Philipp Hardenberg-1772-1801), a close friend of philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, was inspired by Kalidasa's play, Abhinjana Sakuntalam. The death of his fiance Sophie von Kuhn, in her early youth, became merged in his mind with the German perception of India as the cradle of humanity, resulting in his romantic mystery poem about her, Hymns to the Night. In the poem, he united the values of the departed young soul of Sophie with the values of Hinduism, reflecting Friedrich Maier’s (who translated Bhagavad Gita into German in 1802) definition of Sanskrit poetry as Morgentraume unseres Geschlechtes, "the childhood dream of our species." (1)

In 1795, Novalis met the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. He became infatuated with her on their first meeting. In 1795, two days before Sophie turned thirteen they got secretly engaged. Later that year, Novalis's brother Erasmus supported the couple, but the rest of Novalis's family resisted agreeing to the engagement due to Sophie's unclear aristocratic pedigree.

Novalis

In the final months of 1795, Sophie began to suffer declining health due to a liver tumour. She underwent liver surgery in Jena, without anaesthesia. In January 1797, to earn a stable income for the intended marriage, Novalis accepted the job of an auditor to the salt works at Weissenfels. Sophie once more became extremely ill, during which time Novalis's parents finally agreed to the couple's engagement. However, two days after her fifteenth birthday, Sophie died, while Novalis was still in Weissenfels. Four months later, Novalis's brother Erasmus, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, also died. These tragedies affected Novalis deeply. Sophie's death became the central inspiration for one of the few works Novalis published in his lifetime, Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night). Inspired by Kalidasa, he lamented in Hymns to the Night:

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more —
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling —
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Kalidasa, the greatest Sanskrit poet of ancient India, became known in Europe in the last decade of the 18th century, through a translation of William Jones. At that time the English colonial rulers controlled more than half of all of India.

Sir William Jones (1746-1794) took over the post of puisne judge in the Supreme Court of Bengal in 1783 and founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. In 1789, just at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he published an English prose translation of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit drama Abhinjana Sakuntalam. Jones translated Sakuntalam into English as Shakuntala or the Fatal Ring. An astonished Europe, which knew only of the Greek tragedy, realised that ancient India had known the stage play, from ancient times. Jones called Kalidasa the Indian Shakespeare—a lame comparison because Kalidasa preceded him by at least more than ten centuries.

Jones actually completed his first translation of Kalidasa’s drama in Latin. He then rendered it word for word into English, without suppressing any material sentence and disengaged it from the stiffness of a foreign idiom and prepared the faithful translation. (2)

From then on India’s eternal spiritual values expressed through her immortal Sanskrit literature conquered the great creative minds in the West. The Abhijnana Sakuntalam of the fourth-century poet Kalidasa was in demand in the West for India’s eternal values. The influential French Indologist Sylvian Levi (1863-1935) wrote: (3)

"The name of Kalidasa dominates Indian poetry and epitomizes it brilliantly. The drama is a grand and scholarly epic, a truly classical masterpiece, which India admires and humanity recognizes. The praise which is saluting the birth of Shakuntala at Ujjayini has existed over long centuries, bringing illumination from one world to the other since William Jones revealed it to the West."

Lévi's book Théâtre Indien is an important work on the subject of Indian performance art.

Will Durant took note of the event thus: "In 1789 Sir William Jones opened his career as one of the greatest Indologists by translating Kalidasa’s Sakuntala; this translation, re-rendered into German in 1791, profoundly affected Herder and Goethe, and through the Schlegels (Friedrich and August)- the entire Romantic movement." (4)

Thus, Kalidasa’s play Sakuntalam made huge waves in Germany. In fact, so impressed was Goethe with Sakuntala that he decided to learn Sanskrit. Goethe also became acquainted with Kalidasa’s poem, Meghdootam (The Cloud Messenger). Kalidasa’s Vikramōrvaśīyam (Urvashi Won By Valour), as well as Malavikagnimitram, were all translated into German between 1827 and 1856, while Kumara Sambhavam (The Birth of the War God) was translated into German prose in 1913.

Goethe

It was when he attended a lecture by German Indologist Christian Lassen (1800-1876) expounding the Sakuntalam that another German Indologist Paul Jakob Deussen was fired up by Sanskrit and Hinduism.

Influence on Goethe

In 1791, as the Jacobins-the revolutionary democrats-began to extend the revolution against the wealthy in France, Georg Forster, the Mainz Jacobin, produced his German prose translation of Jones’ English version of Sakuntalam.

He sent a copy to Goethe, who was so enthusiastic about the drama that he sang its praises in two couplets:

If in one word of blooms of early and fruits of riper years,

Of excitement and enchantment I should tell,

Of fulfilment and content, of Heaven and Earth;

Then will l but say Sakuntala and have said all. *

Goethe had the lines printed in the Deutsche Monatsschrift (German Monthly Journal) the same year. Goethe wrote later: “Recalling the enthusiasm with which we Germans welcomed this translation of Sakuntala we can attribute the pleasure it gave us to the prose in which it came to us”. (5)

In Goethe’s correspondence and diaries, it is revealed that it held a special place in Goethe’s heart. (6)

French Scholar Antoine Leonard de Chezy presented Goethe with his French edition of Sakuntalam. In a letter of gratitude to Chezy, Goethe opened up himself before the European world: "The first time I came upon this inexhaustible work, [Sakuntala] it aroused such enthusiasm in me and so held me that I could not stop studying it. I even felt impelled to make the impossible attempt to bring it in some form to the German stage. These efforts were fruitless but they made me so thoroughly acquainted with this most valuable work, it represented such an "epoch in my life", I so absorbed it, that for thirty years I did not look at either the English or the German version. It is only now that I understand the enormous impression that work, made on me at an earlier age."

German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who was also living in Weimar at that time, set Goethe's couplet at the head of his article, On the Eastern Drama (1792). He said about the text, “I cannot find a product of the human mind more pleasant than this, a real blossom of the Orient, the first and most beautiful of its kind.” He also said that India was a holy land he yearned for.

He mentioned Sakuntalam again in 1798: “Since Sakuntala is unfortunately still the only example of her (India’s) perfected culture, one lingers with pleasure over it. We must have more Sakuntalas shortly, for they are the finest contributions to the cultural history of the peoples”. (7)

In 1803, Herder published Forster’s translation of the drama again and added a dedication to which he gave renewed his admiration for Kalidasa. Friedrich Schlegel came to know Forster’s first edition at the Leipzig Fair, and he wrote to his brother and poet August Schelegel about Sakuntala. He went later to Paris to learn Sanskrit and introduced the study of Indology into Germany.

Forster’s work had a very considerable influence on German middle-class society.

Friedrich Rueckert translated the drama directly from Sanskrit into German again in 1855, but it was only published in 1867, after his death.

The publication of Heinrich Heine’s posthumous works in 1869 brought to light that Heine had noticed something very special about Indian drama. In the chapter entitled Thoughts and Ideas he wrote: “Goethe made use of Sakuntalam at the beginning of Faust." (8) Goethe conceived the idea of the Vorspiel auf dem Theater (Prelude) in Faust from the prologue to Sakuntalam. All Sanskrit dramas will have a prayer in the beginning. In Sakuntala, an actor appears first on the stage and prays to Siva. Indian drama was part of a long religious ceremony filling several hours. Then the stage director comes on and informs the heroine that Kalidisa’s drama Sakuntalam is to be performed before an enlightened audience. The stage director then calls on the leading actress to sing a strophe in praise of the prevailing summer.

In Goethe’s prologue, the director comes out on the stage with the poet and the comedian and asks both for their help. He is embarrassed, for his audience is enlightened. The poet thinks only of posterity. The comedian will hear nothing of posterity and wants only to amuse contemporaries. The director demands an impressive spectacle. “Plunge into the fullness of life”, the comedian advises the poet; “everybody lives it, but few know it. And wherever you seize upon it, it is amusing.”

The poet speaks of “the urge towards truth and the joy of deceiving”. The three thus discourse on the deepest problems of art. Kalidasa followed the old Indian custom of composing a short prologue which introduces the audience to the poet and the title of the play. He used it to flatter his audience, composed of just a small group of gentlemen, nobles and Brahmans, higher officials, and perhaps a few wealthy merchants, who gathered on some festive occasion in a comparatively small theatre or the king’s court. The mass of the people was not even speaking chaste Sanskrit. They did not even understand the play. Thus, while the two prologues are different, the fact is that Kalidasa inspired Goethe to experiment with the alienation technique in drama, much much before the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht tried it.

Forster

Goethe also became acquainted with Kalidasa’s play Meghadootam, the Cloud Messenger, from H. H. Wilson's translation into English. In 1811 Wilson was appointed First secretary to the newly founded Asiatic Society in Bengal, and in 1813 he published the text and translation of the Meghadootam in Calcutta. In this poem, a spirit banned from its world sends a message through a cloud to his beloved in his homeland. Goethe wrote an epigram on this: (9)

What more pleasant could man wish?

Sakontala, Nala, these must one kiss;

And Megha-Duta, the cloud messenger,

Who would not send him to a soul sister!

In his “Notes to the West-East Divan,” Goethe recorded: “The first meeting with a work such as this is always an event in our lives”. (10)But he also criticised Wilson’s translation as too smooth. In 1826 Wilhelm von Humboldt praised this play for its wonderful description of the beginning of the rainy season when the first clouds come up from the South.

After C. Schuetz published the first prose translation of Sakuntalam in 1859 in Bielefeld, several others followed, some of them in verse.

In 1827 H H Wilson’s English translation of Kalidasa’s drama Urvasi Won by Valour (Vikramorvaseeyam) and a short summary of his third drama Malavika and Agnimitra became known in Europe. Malavika Agnimitram was translated into German by Berlin Indologist A. Weber in 1856. No less a man than prominent German Jew novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger prepared it for the German stage in 1917 under the title, The King and the Dancer.

Vikramorvaseeyam was published in 1814 by Bollensen in a German translation. Rueckert had only included a few translated Verses in his summary of 1834. In 1833 Rueckert also translated a few verses from Kalidasa’s epic poem, The Line of Raghu (Raghu Vamsa)—the section containing Aja’s mourning for his dead wife Indumati. A free metric translation appeared in German done by A. F. Von Schack in 1890 and in prose by O. Walter in 1914.

Kalidasa’s sixth work, The Birth of the War God (Kumara Sambhavam), was translated by Griffith into English in 1879 and by O. Walter into German prose in 1913.

Herder

Thus, it took over a hundred years for all six of Kalidasa’s works to reach Germans in translations. In 1921, Indologist Alfred Hillebrandt (1853-1957) first published his work, Kalidasa: An Attempt at a Literary Appraisal, in Breslau. It was written in 1918, during the war. 

Studies on Kalidasa

Hillebrandt studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the University of Breslau as a student of Adolf Friedrich Stenzler, then continued his studies at the University of Munich under Martin Haug. In 1883 he became an associate professor at Breslau, where in 1887 he attained a full professorship. 

His speciality was Vedic mythology. Varuna und Mitra, ein Beitrag Zur Exegese des Veda (Varuna and Mitra, a contribution to the exegesis of the Veda, 1877) was a prologue to his great work Vedische Mythologie (1891-1902), which was later translated into English and published as "Vedic mythology". Hillebrandt also wrote:

Das altindische Neu- und Vollmondsopfer (The ancient Indian New and Full Moon Sacrifices, 1880), Vedachrestomathie (Vedic chrestomathy, 1885), A section on religious antiquities in Georg Bühler's Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde (Outline of Indo-Aryan Philology and Archaeology, 1897), Alt-Indien, Kulturgeschichtliche Skizzen (Historical Culture Sketches of Ancient India, 1899), and translation of Vishakadatta's play Mudrarakshasam Part-I )

In the study on Kalidasa, he describes the times, works and art of the poet in 166 pages and comes to the conclusion that “Kalidasa can never approach the popularity of our ancient classics amongst us.” Indian Literature is “too far removed from our sensitivity to competing with Homer or with the poet of the Antigone, or to hold permanently the interest of educated persons in the way Shakespeare or Dante does …. We find too little manly strength, too little dramatic élan, too little inner struggle and revolt against fate… We demand deeper problems." (11)

But no one can accept Hillebrandt’s shoddy judgment. Hillebrandt wrote for a narrow circle of educated persons who were searching for a way out of Germany’s post-war misery in world literature. Germany cannot demand a “revolt against fate” etc. from an Indian classical poet. Kalidasa wrote for the peace-loving Indian people, who never wanted a tragedy in theatre, and Sage Bharata prohibited tragedies in Indian theatre in his treatise, Natya Shastra. Except for a couple of tragedies, Indian theatre is generally for happy endings. Germans have to try to understand Kalidasa in his own background-Goethe and Herder had found a great poet in Kalidasa, who loved his fellowmen and gave vent their passions, joys and sorrows vividly, and he had a critical attitude towards the weaknesses of the ruling elite of his time.

Kalidasa‘s world is strange to Europeans. But Germans, and Europe for that matter, need to understand this world. Once through the strange outer boundaries, they quickly find the general human content within. The European world will be poor if they remain confined to their own German or European culture.

The German naturalist, traveller and statesman Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) wrote about Indian poetry and observed that Kalidasa is a masterly describer of the influence which Nature exercises upon the minds of lovers. This great poet flourished at the splendid court of Vikramaditya, and was, therefore, contemporary with Virgil and Horace. Tenderness in the expression of feeling, and richness of creative fancy, have assigned to him his lofty place among the poets of all nations. (12)

Hillebrandt

Georg Forster, the Jacobin, wrote in his introduction to his translation of Sakuntalam (1791): “Every country has its peculiarities, which influence the spiritual powers and the organisations of its people. If we compare these varying individualities and separate the general from the local, we shall arrive at the right understanding of mankind... Here an entirely new vista opens up before our feelings and our imagination, an extraordinarily beautiful individuality of the human character... It is necessary to set out clearly how the differences between Indian mythology, history and customs and the Greek, for instance, lend the artworks of that country an unusual form and appearance to us, but also to show how the significant thing about such works is not whether they consist of five or seven scenes, but that the most delicate feelings which the human heart can sense can be just as finely expressed on the Ganges by dark brown people as on the Rhine, the Tiber or the Ilissus by our white races”. (13)

Walter Ruben's Views

Acknowledging this view, Walter Ruben (1899-19820, a renowned German Marxist Indologist studied Kalidasa in detail and produced an important book in German, Kalidasa Die menschliche Bedeutung seiner Werke (Kalidasa and the Human Meaning of His Works -1957). Ruben belonged to the ranks of the great German Indologists such as Max Muller, Hermann Oldenberg, Hermann Jacobi and Heinrich Luders, who devoted their lives to building up intellectual relations between Germany and India. To Ruben, the studies of Indian history and languages were not an end in itself but an endeavour to find things from the point of view of continuity in India’s historical progress through various social formations. (14) Thus, he studied Kalidasa from a historical perspective.

He alludes to Kalidasa's death in Sri Lanka. King Kumaradasa of Ceylon wrote one day on the wall of a courtesan’s room the beginning- of a verse (he was himself a poet) and offered gold as a prize for anyone who completed the verse. Kalidasa did so, but the courtesan, greedy for gold, killed him, buried him and herself took credit for the poem. Of course, the King detected the deception, for he was familiar with Kalidasa’s art.

King Kumaradasa of Ceylon is said to have ascended the throne in 515, and this seems to fit in with Kalidasa’s time, even though dates are often contradictory. Presumably, Kalidasa was already well known in 473, for at that time a poet in Mandasor (which is near Kalidasa’s home) caused an inscription to be carved on the sun temple, some of whose verses are modelled on Kalidasa’s. Others assert that Kalidasa can only have composed one part of his “Line of Raghu” after 455. In this part, he praises the mythical King Raghu on account of a victory he won over the Huns. Th^ oldest victory of an Indian king over the Huns known to us, however, was that of King Skandagupta of the glorious Gupta dynasty, who ascended the throne in 455.

So, Kalidasa would have lived between Skanda Gupta’s time (approximately 455-467) and Kumaradasa’s (515) but was already being imitated in 473. Other Indologists think that Kalidasa had already lived under Samudragupta and (or) Chandragupta II (375-375 or 375— 413), that he praised the victories of these in his works, and also that these two kings had taken the additional name of Vikrama, at whose court Kalidasa is traditionally supposed to have lived.

If these chronological assumptions are correct, Kalidasa lived in the times of the famous Gupta kings, between 320 and 455 which is generally regarded as India’s golden age. In the times of the above-mentioned Chandragupta II — perhaps also in Kalidasa’s time — a Chinese Buddhist, Fa Hsien, lived for about ten years in the Kingdom of the Guptas and left an enthusiastic description of conditions there.

Ruben

Fa Hsien praised the government for its generosity for instance, that no passes were needed, that there was no death penalty and that rebels only suffered punishment by having the right hand chopped off, that the people lived pious Buddhist lives, ate no meat, drank no wine, that there were no wine shops and no butchers’ shops and so on. But he also mentions that Candalas, as “untouchables”, lived apart from “clean” persons and, when they passed along crowded roads, has to tap a warning of their approach with a stick.

Buddhism plays but a small role in Kalidasa’s work, and the ascetic life none at all. The young queen in “Malavika and Agnimitra” even comes on to the stage in the third act in a slightly drunken condition, and is pleased about it, without being criticised by anyone on that account. And at the beginning of Act II of “Sakuntala,” the comic Brahman complains that there is practically nothing but meat roasted on the spit at the King’s hunting excursion.

There can be no doubt that Buddhism was a living religion during this period in India, and that about that time the Buddhists developed a system of logic which is generally placed on a level with Aristotelian logic. Thus it can be assumed that the Buddhist pilgrim Fa Hsien saw only the Buddhist India of that period and Kalidasa, as Sivaite, only the Brahman India. It should, however, be noted that Fa Hsien mentions the sad fate of the “untouchables”. We may conclude from this that the glory of the Gupta court was to a great extent built on human misery.

The Gupta kings ruled over a mighty kingdom which included almost all of northern India, the broad Ganges basin between the Himalayas and the mountains of the Deccan, the northern area of which belongs to the West-East Narbada line. In northern India, the first States existed before 2000 BC. Here the primitive forests of the Ganges valley were almost all cut and ploughed in Kalidasa’s time. Here the Videha tribe, in the last stages of the decline of the gentile society, was mentioned for the last time in the history of northern India at the beginning of the Gupta period. Here, shortly after the invasion of Alexander of Macedon in 326 BC, there had a mighty kingdom which, however, existed only for four generations of its dynasty, the Maurya, similar to the Gupta kingdom itself, which began to decline in its fifth generation under Skandagupta.

Ujjain was at that time not only the centre of the Gupta power but also of Indian astronomy. Since about the third-century old Indian astronomy had received powerful impetus through Alexandrian scholars. Greek-Roman astronomical works were revised by Indians, and Ujjain was the Greenwich at that time for the Hindus, for, according to the Greek tradition through Alexandria, their meridian ran through this city. This scientific contact and development should be highly valued, and occasional references in Kalidasa’s works indicate the influence of Greek-Roman astronomy.

Mathematics is closely connected with astronomy in India. The famous mathematician and astronomer Aryabhatta lived and worked approximately in Kalidasa’s time. He is said to have been born in 476 and to have taught that the earth revolves around its own axis. 

Logic, as already indicated, was an essential subject of study at that time. Of the Brahmans, mention should be made of Vatsyayana in the Gupta period, who was the first to advance from evidence to conclusion, and of the Buddhists mention should be made of Dignaga, who made a systematic investigation of the possibilities of compulsive, probable and false conclusions. Grammar had already been brought to completion about five hundred years previously, and all aspects of the Sanscrit language had been interpreted in rules. At the latest half a millennium before Kalidasa’s time Sanscrit had ceased to be a living language and was spoken only by scholars and poets — who were of course also scholars.

Indians of Kalidasa’s time also made a study of love, which seems to us an unusual subject of scientific study. This was an investigation of the strategy and economics of the forces in the love conflict between the sexes. This “science”, as contained in the textbook of Vatsyayana available to us, had probably been set down sometime before Kalidasa’s day. Many believe that Kalidasa himself paid careful attention to the details of this teaching. In his epic, The Birth of the War God, during the wedding of the two gods, the man’s hand perspires from excitement; in his other epic, The Line of Raghu, the wife’s hand perspires during the wedding of Aja and Indumati. The second description follows the instructions on love, and it was therefore cleverly supposed that the latter work was written later and that the poet here wished to correct the “mistake” he had made in the earlier work. It is of course not certain that the poet actually was such a “scholar” or pedantic. Perhaps, on the contrary, he wished in his later epic to break away from his earlier slavish adherence to the tradition of love teachings. The order in which the two works were written is in fact not certain, and such arguments based on comparison are therefore not conclusive. 

Myths, sagas and semi-historical happenings must have been sung in epic form amongst the peoples in very early times; more than 500 years before Kalidasa Brahmans must have created the two great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, in this way. They modified them according to Vishnu traditions, but Siva also plays a considerable role in the Mahabharata. Later poets took most of their subject matter from these epics. Kalidasa took the subject of his Line of Raghu from the Ramayana and of his Sakuntala, Urvasi and The Birth of the War God from the Mahabharata.

So when Kalidasa, for example, in his Line of Raghu, deals with the ancestors and descendants of the mythical hero Rama, he did not take their order entirely from the Ramayana, the old epic of that hero, nor entirely from the Vishnu Purana, or from any other surviving Purana, but his material is certainly of Purana origin and so is the poet’s religion. There were certainly remains of the Vedic religion in his time. In the fifth act of Sakuntala, for instance, the king permits a delegation of forest hermits to be received by his teacher and palace priest Somarata. He then has them led into the hall of the Vedic fire cult, receives them there himself and finally acts on the advice of his palace priest. 

In Manu Smrithi VII, 58 it is further stated that the king should discuss all important political questions with a learned Brahman as the most worthy of his ministers. The kings in Kalidasa’s Malavika and Sakuntala do actually consult with a minister over certain questions — in Malavika even with a council of ministers, but not especially with a learned Brahman. On the other hand, Kalidasa’s kings have a Brahman as a comic figure near them, according to the custom of the Indian theatre.

Reuben points out that Rabindranath Tagore’s book Shipwreck (1906), is convincing evidence of Kalidasa’s living influence. Here Tagore himself refers to The Birth of the War God, and a comparison of the two works shows that Tagore was considerably influenced by the older work. Tagore had occupied himself since the early 1890s with Kalidasa’s verse and prose works, but especially with Sakuntala, Meghaduta and Kumarasambhava.

Tagore has, so to say, translated the old Siva fable into the modem form, using it as one thread running through his novel. In both Kalidasa’s Birth of the War God and Tagore’s Shipwreck we find a widower who practices yoga rites and retreats from this world, but Tagore’s figure works as a doctor. In 1886 — when Tagore was 25 — the first part of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita was published in Bengal. Swami Vivekananda, taught in Bengal during the 1890s a new interpretation of the Gita, its yoga in action and its other forms of yoga.

Sakuntala, the Marvel 

Sakuntala became one of the most circulated Indian masterpieces- it was reprinted five times in England between 1790 and 1807 and it was retranslated and published many times throughout Europe. (15) The century after Jones translated it, Shakuntala appeared in forty-six translations in twelve different languages in Europe. (16)

Jones went on to translate another of Kalidasa’s poems, Ritusamhara, in 1792. He published it in Calcutta as The Seasons, A Descriptive Poem. (17) His English translation of Shakuntala, together with his Hymns to Narayana, were studied with fond devotion by Percy Bysshe Shelly(1792-1822), Robert Southey(1774-1843), Thomas Moore(1779-1857), Alfred Tennyson(1850-1892) and other nineteenth-century English poets. (18) Thanks to the influence of Jones’ Shakuntala and Hymns to Narayana, Shelly was able to overcome his atheistic and materialistic tendencies. (19)

Sophie, fiance of Novalis

In 1853, the Sanskrit-English lexicographer, Sir Monier Monier-Williams(1819-1899) came under the eternal charm of Sanskrit. In his Sakoontala or The Lost Ring: An Indian Drama, Translated into Prose and Verse from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa, Monier Williams presented the English public with a free translation of Shakuntala. It was published in 1855 followed by a second edition in 1876. In his Introduction he wrote:

"The most celebrated drama of the great Indian Shakespeare. The need felt by the British public for such a translation as I have here offered the most popular of the Indian dramas, in which the customs of the Hindus, their opinions, prejudices, and fables; their religious rites, daily occupations, and amusements are reflected as in a mirror."(20)

Monier Williams highly appreciated Kalidasa’s use of eleven different varieties of meter in the first thirty-four verses of the poem… He chose to employ in his translation both blank verse and rhyming stanzas. (But) He felt his own meters to be prosaic and was aware that he might not have expressed in language as musical as his(Kalidasa’s) own. (21) He humbly acknowledged, "I have done all in my power to avoid substituting a fictitious and meagre poem of my own and that œno metrical system in English could give any idea of the almost infinite resources(of Sanskrit)". (22)

During the 1790s, Oriental research in Jena, Weimar and Heidelberg and then at Bonn, Berlin and Tubingen was established. German translations and re-translations of Sakuntalam, along with the Laws of Manu and the Gita Govinda were studied in depth and ignited a fervid intensity in receptive German minds. (23)  Their contact with India’s original and universal religion through its literature gave them a sense of enlightenment.

_________________________________

1. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, New York, Oriental Renaissance, p 53

2. Dorothy Matilda Figueira, Translating the Orient, The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Albany, 1991, p 26

3. Quoted in Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Calcutta 1946, p 175

4. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, p 391-2

5. Walter Ruben, Kalidasa: The Human Meaning of His Works, trans. Joan Becker,
People's Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984, p 2

6. J.W. von Goethe, Werke, Weimar ed.(W.A), Weimar, 1887-1912, cited from Translating the Orient, 215,p 5

7. Ruben, p 1

8. Ibid, p 2

9. Ibid, p 5

10. Ibid, p 5

11. Ibid, p 4-5

12. Quoted in the Introduction, Monier Williams, Sakoontala: or the Lost Ring, Hertford, 1855, x

13. Ruben, p 7

14. Abanti Kumar Sanyal, A Tribute, Walter Ruben, Kalidasa: The Human Meaning of His Works, trans. Joan Becker, People's Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984

15. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, New York, p 51,53

16. Dorothy, Translating the Orient, p 12

17.Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p 31

18. Marie E.D.Meester, Oriental Influence in the English Literature of the Early Nineteenth Century, p10

19. P.V. De Sola, Sir William Jones and English Literature, p 694

20. Moniere Williams, Sakoontala, p xi-xii

21. Ibid, p xiii

22. Ibid, p xii

23. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p 53

* Translation by E.B.Eastwick:

Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its decline,

And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed,
Wouldst thou the earth and Heaven itself in one sole name combine?
I name thee, O Sakuntala! And all at once is said.

© Ramachandran 

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