WILLIAM JONES FINDS KALIDASA AND PATNA

The Journey of William Jones in India

When a financially constrained William Jones landed in Calcutta On 25 September 1783, to secure his life and family, a tremendous treasure was waiting for him there, in the form of Indian ancient wisdom. 

William Jones (1746- 1794) could read two dozen languages by 1783, the year he was appointed judge in the Bengal Supreme Court, for a lucrative 6,000 pounds a year. He had composed Latin poems, translated pre-Islamic Arabic odes into English and a biography of Iran ruler Nader Shah from Persian into French. Jones initially supported the American war of independence but received the judgeship because his accomplishments deflected attention from his sympathy for the American side.

A linguistic prodigy, Jones was born in London in 1746 to Maria Jones, the daughter of a cabinetmaker and a 71-year-old mathematician, also named William Jones (1675-1749), whose peers included Isaac Newton. William Jones Sr was known for introducing the letter π. His father died when Jones was just three, but his mother Maria gave him a good education, at Harrow and Oxford. By 17, Jones had written his first poem, Caissa in English, based on a 658-line poem called Scacchia, Ludus published in 1527 by Marco Girolamo Vida, giving a mythical origin of chess that has become well known in the chess world.

William Jones

By the time of his death, Jones knew eight languages thoroughly, was fluent in a further eight, with a dictionary at hand, and had a fair competence in another twelve. (1) A desire to read the Bible in the original drew him to Hebrew, and an interest in Confucius led him to Chinese. He thought Greek poetry “sublime" but when he “tasted Arabic and Persian poetry", his enthusiasm for Greek “began to dry up". The only language he ignored was his native Welsh.

To support his mother, he took a position tutoring the seven-year-old Lord Althorp, son of Earl Spencer. For the next six years, he worked as a tutor and translator. During this time he published Histoire de Nader Chah (1770), a French translation of a work originally written in Persian by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi. This was done at the request of King Christian VII of Denmark: he had visited Jones, who by the age of 23 had already acquired a reputation as an orientalist, and in appreciation of his work he was granted membership in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. (2)

By his mid-20s, Jones had authored several books. While a knighthood arrived, the want of a steady income brought huge pressures. “I was surrounded by friends, acquaintances and relatives who encouraged me to expel from my way of life…poetry and Asian literature." They wanted him to “become a barrister and be devoted to ambition".

In 1770, Jones joined the Middle Temple and studied law for three years, a preliminary to his life work in India. He spent some time as a circuit judge in Wales, and then became involved in politics: he made a fruitless attempt to resolve the American Revolution in concert with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, (3) and ran for the post of Member of Parliament from Oxford in the general election of 1780, but failed. (4)

But he managed to orient his legal interests also towards the East, producing the forbiddingly named Mahomedan Law Of Succession To The Property Of Intestates. Naturally, his political ambitions floundered. As a supporter of American independence, his work, The Principles of Government; in a Dialogue Between a Scholar and a Peasant (1783), was the subject of a trial for seditious libel (known as the Case of the Dean of St Asaph) after it was reprinted by his brother-in-law William Davies Shipley. (5)

Once his Judge appointment was confirmed, the 38-year-old Jones married his longtime betrothed, Anna Shipley, the eldest daughter of Dr Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of Llandaff and Bishop of St Asaph. Anna Maria used her artistic skills to help Jones document life in India. 

He planned to spend five or six years in India before retiring and returning to England. As things turned out, he continued to live in Bengal till his death in 1794, and it is for the Indian enquiries that he is chiefly remembered. Within four months of stepping on Indian shores, he founded the Asiatic Society, which was devoted to studying the culture of the largest continent. Apart from being white and male, prospective members needed to express a love of knowledge to be admitted to the club, whose initial meetings were held in a jury room of the Calcutta court. He nudged his fellow Britons to welcome Indian members but only got them to accept the inclusion of native contributions in the society’s journal.

Around this time Jones began to study Indian languages in earnest, employing a group of Indian scholars to collect and translate Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts. In the weeks he was free from court duties, he would move upriver to a thatch-roof bungalow in Krishnagar, a centre of Sanskrit learning, discarding his judge’s robes for loose kurtas and spending more time conversing with pandits than with fellow countrymen. Only a handful of Europeans before him had acquired a working knowledge of Sanskrit.

He connected his pursuit of money with a pursuit of intellectual stimulation. This quest for financial stability was something Jones shared with another great Indologist Max Mueller who contested the elections for the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1860. The chair had just been vacated by the English Orientalist Horace Hayman Wilson. Horace Wilson had done the first translation of the Rig Veda as well as Kalidasa's Meghadoota while working as a surgeon in India.

Jones drew up a list of 16 subjects, ranging from the Mughal and Maratha political systems to the “Music of the Eastern Nations" and “Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery and Anatomy of the Indians", to investigate. And it took him only a year-long glance at India’s cultural exuberance, to constitute the Asiatic Society—the body that reminded Indians of a forgotten figure: emperor Ashoka.

He was entranced by Indian culture, and on 15 January 1784 he founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. (6) What struck Jones most was language. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about Jones: “Sanskrit fascinated him…. It was through his writings and translations that Europe first had a glimpse of some of the treasures of Sanskrit literature." Jones could interpret Islamic law without translators, but Hindu codes evaded him. He hired a pandit on a princely retainer to give him lessons, and soon Jones built up a vocabulary of 10,000 words. When Brahmins in Benares refused to translate the Manusmriti for him, he produced his own: The Ordinances Of Manu.

He studied the Vedas with Rāmalocana, a pandit teaching at the Nadiya Hindu university, becoming a proficient Sanskritist. (7) Jones kept up a ten-year correspondence on the topic of Jyotisha or Hindu astronomy with fellow orientalist Samuel Davis. (8) He learnt the ancient concept of Hindu Laws from Pandit Jagannath Tarka Panchanan (9), who had a free school for students.

The Aryan Language

Mulling over the structure of the language that had opened the doors of classical Indian learning to him, he came to a path-breaking conclusion, made public in his third annual address to the Asiatic Society, delivered on 2 February 1786:

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family." (10)

He accurately included Gothic, Celtic and Persian in the list of languages which had sprung from the same root as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Thus he inaugurated the field of comparative linguistics and the idea of the Indo-European family of languages. Other philologists had previously produced analogous hypotheses, but this was the definitive statement. (11) But in many ways his work was less accurate than his predecessors, as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages while omitting Hindustani (12) and Slavic. (13)

Jones was the first to propose the concept of an "Aryan invasion" into the Indian subcontinent, which according to him, led to a lasting ethnic division in India between the descents of indigenous Indians and those of the Aryans. This idea fell into obscurity due to a lack of evidence but was later taken up by amateur Indologists such as the colonial administrator Herbert Hope Risley. (14) Jones also propounded theories that might appear peculiar today but were less so in his time. For example, he believed that Egyptian priests had migrated and settled down in India in prehistoric times. He also posited that the Chinese were originally Hindus belonging to the Kshatriya caste. (15)

Sakuntala and Dushyantha, by Raja Ravivarma

While translations from Sanskrit had a beneficial impact on the West, the same could not be said of the discovery of the Indo-European language group. The first speakers of Sanskrit, the Vedic people, referred to themselves as aryas. The family of languages discovered by Jones came to be called the Aryan family. The idea of an Aryan language family mutated into belief in an Aryan race.

The prolific 19th French writer Arthur de Gobineau popularised the idea of a master race of Aryans, superior in form and intellect to all other ethnic groups. He claimed that all great civilisations had been formed by Aryans, but that these noble invaders had sullied themselves in nations like Iran and India by mixing with other races. The closest thing to living inheritors of the pure Aryan strain was, in Gobineau’s view, modern Germans. His ideas were well received in Germany, notably within the influential circle of the composer Richard Wagner. Members of the Wagner circle adopted the theory of a Germanic master race and gave it a specifically anti-semitic emphasis. The rest is history.

Sakuntalam in English

Apart from the language, Jones felt a deeper affection for Sanskrit poetry. “By rising before the sun," wrote Jones, “I allot an hour every day…and am charmed with knowing so beautiful a sister of Latin and Greek." It was the first time a familial bond was established between Sanskrit and the classical languages of European antiquity.

In 1788, Jones translated into English, Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalam, giving it the title, Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring. His preface mentioned that Kalidasa lived “at a time when the Britons were as unlettered and unpolished as the army of Hanuman”, and described the play as “a most pleasing and authentic picture of old Hindu manners, and one of the greatest curiosities that the literature of Asia has yet brought to light”. The published translation was faithful to the original apart from a deleted description of Shakuntala’s breasts, considered too steamy for the conservative British public.*

It was censorship, given the pseudo-moral predispositions of the West. Where Kalidasa spoke of Shakuntala's "young breasts seem to lie hidden as a flower amid the autumn leaves," Jones omitted the breasts completely. In a way, Jones modelled a new Shakuntala—a prototype of so-called European virtue, as opposed to the sensuous Shakuntala a free Kalidasa described; an Indian woman born of Victorian idealism.

The action of Abhijnanasakuntalam commences with king Dushyanta on a hunt. Pursuing a deer, Dushyanta chances upon the hermitage of sage Kanva and is captivated by his foster-daughter Shakuntala. He courts Shakuntala, weds her, gets her pregnant, and leaves for his kingdom, promising an early reunion. Lost in dreamy memories, Shakuntala fails to notice the arrival of sage Durvasa. He tells Shakuntala that she will be completely forgotten by the man whose thoughts kept her from doing her duty. Shakuntala loses the ring while bathing in a river, and is rejected by Dushyanta when she appears in his court. The ring she has lost has been swallowed by a fish and it is restored by fishermen. Dushyanta recognises the king’s seal and thus remembers Shakuntala.

But the story of Shakuntala presented in the epic Mahabharata is a little different from Kalidasa’s version. In the Mahabharata, Dushyanta recognises Shakuntala immediately but refuses to acknowledge their connection fearing public censure. It takes a voice from the heavens confirming Shakuntala’s story. There’s no lost ring, no fish and no recognition scene. There are, however, two other places in the epic where a fish plays an intermediary function.

Near the beginning of the Mahabharata, we find a king Uparichara hunting, as was Dushyanta. Uparichara fells asleep and had a wet dream. Upset, he summons a hawk, gives it a leaf on which some of his semen has spilt, and instructs the bird to take it to his wife in the palace. However, another hawk attacks Uparichara’s carrier bird, mistaking the semen-spotted leaf for juicy prey. The leaf falls into the river Yamuna, where it is swallowed by a fish.

The king of fisher folk finds a baby girl inside the fish and adopts her. It is Satyavati, who carries a strong odour of fish in her. Enamoured of the girl, Sage Parashara offers to replace the smell of fish with a pleasant fragrance if she sleeps with him. She gives birth to Parashara’s son Krishna Dvaipana, the Dark Islander, who is the author of Mahabharatha himself.

A while later, Satyavati, her hymen restored by Parashara, marries king Shantanu and has two sons with him. The first die while single, and the second, Vichitravirya, succumbs to tuberculosis soon after his wedding. Seeing Shantanu worried about leaving behind no successor, Satyavati tells him about her natural son. They summon Krishna Dvaipayana, requesting him to impregnate Vichitravirya’s two wives. The young women, who expect to share a bed with a handsome king, are faced instead by a fearsome-looking mendicant. One blanches at the sight of Dvaipayana, while the other shuts her eyes in fear during sex. He informs them that their reactions have determined the fate of their progeny. One son will be a pale weakling, and the other will be blind from birth.

These two sons, Pandu and Dhritarashtra, fathers of the Pandavas and Kauravas respectively, fight the Mahabharata war. Dvaipayana retires to the mountains, where he divides Brahma’s singular Veda into four.

Near the conclusion of the Mahabharata, a group of sages come visiting, among them Kanva, in whose hermitage Shakuntala lived all those generations ago. A few Yadus disguise their companion Samba as a pregnant woman, with a mace providing a bulging belly. They take Samba to the visiting sages and ask whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. The sage curses that Samba will give birth to an iron mace which will destroy the entire clan. The panicked Yadus grind the mace to a powder which they throw into the sea. However, the particles are washed ashore and absorbed by reeds that grow at the water’s edge. One chunk of iron, which has been left intact, is swallowed by a fish. Years later, past hatreds resurface, leading to armed combat. The sharp, iron-stiffened reeds prove handy weapons. The fish which swallowed the unground bit of iron has, meanwhile, been caught. The hunter Jara fashions an arrowhead out of the metal, and kills Krishna with it, having mistaken him for a deer.

These three legends – the stories of Shakuntala, Uparichara and Jara – provide varying perspectives on the Orientalist enterprise. In the first instance, Orientalism is like Dushyanta’s ring, a beneficent force returning a precious memory to India and reconnecting the nation with its forgotten history. In the second, it is like Uparichara’s seed, being transmitted to another land with both consequences, good and evil. Finally, British Orientalism is like Jara’s arrowhead, a weapon used consciously or otherwise towards an evil end. 

Jones Finds Chandragupta

William Jones made one crucial contribution to the study of Indian history by providing the first accurate dating for the reign of an Indian sovereign who had ruled before the common era. Greek chronicles mentioned that Seleucus Nicator, who succeeded to Alexander the Great’s eastern dominions, had sent his ambassador Megasthenes to the court of an emperor named Sandrocottus at Palibothra. Historians had speculated that Palibothra was the same as Pataliputra, the city known as Patna in modern times. 

Jones's tomb in Kolkata

However, Megasthenes had described the capital of Sandrocottus as standing at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Erranaboas, but only the first of these flowed through Patna. Jones unearthed the fact that Patna used to be the site of the confluence of the Ganga and the Son before the latter changed its course. He found, that another name for the Son was the Hiranyabahu, which matched the Erranaboas of Megasthenes’ account. Finally, he discovered a play which told of a usurper king called Chandragupta, who had a court at Pataliputra and had welcomed foreign ambassadors to it. Thus, Jones could state that Chandragupta was the same as Sandrocottus, whose reign had to have commenced between 325 BCE and 312 BCE.

Following Jones’s evidence, the story of the dynasty of Chandragupta, the Mauryas was pieced together. The history is related to Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka was unravelled by James Prinsep, who came to Calcutta in 1819 as Assistant Assay-Master in the Mint and was later posted to Benares. Prinsep studied indecipherable inscriptions in two scripts, Brahmi and Kharoshti. After years of painstaking collation of data from edicts and coins, Prinsep succeeded in the late 1830s in decoding them.

It was revealed that the pillar and rock inscriptions had been commanded by a king referred to as Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods. His kingdom was clearly Buddhist in inspiration. Prinsep was informed by a colleague posted in Ceylon that a great Indian king called Ashoka, also known as Piyadasi, had converted to Buddhism and sent a religious mission to Ceylon. The mystery was thus resolved and Ashoka got his rightful place in Indian history. It was as if Dushyanta’s lost memory had been restored.

Influence on Western Thought

The prologue from Goethe’s Faust, which is influenced by the sutradhar who speaks in the first scene of Abhijnanasakuntalam, is only the first of many examples of the influence of Indian thought on Europe. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “Sanskrit literature will be no less influential for our time than Greek literature was in the fifteenth century for the Renaissance.” His great book, The World as Will and Idea (1819), is profoundly marked by Vedantic and Buddhist thought.

Schopenhauer used Jones's authority to relate the basic principle of his philosophy to what was, according to Jones, the most important underlying proposition of Vedânta. Schopenhauer was trying to support the doctrine that "everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is the only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation." He quoted Jones's original English:

"... How early this basic truth was recognized by the sages of India since it appears as the fundamental tenet of the Vedânta philosophy ascribed to Vyasa, is proved by Sir William Jones in the last of his essays, On the Philosophy of the Asiatics (Asiatic Researches, vol. IV, p. 164): "The fundamental tenet of the Vedânta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms."

At the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, clearly echoing Indian notions of cyclical time, demonstrated the continuing hold of India on the German imagination.

Indian idealistic thought penetrated Russia and Romania, it crossed the Atlantic and was taken up by the American transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, most conspicuously his poem Brahma, expounded a Upanishadic conviction in Over-Soul, an essay published by him in 1814. Transcendentalism laid the foundation for the success of Swami Vivekananda in  America.

Jones announced in his preface to Sacontala that it would be his last literary translation and that he would henceforth concentrate on his professional studies. Jones was unhappy with the appointed pandits of the court, who were tasked with interpreting the laws of Hinduism and contributing to judgements. After a number of cases in which different pandits came up with different rulings, Jones determined to thoroughly learn Sanskrit so that he could independently interpret the original sources. (16)

The ambitious goal he had set himself was to translate into English the Laws of Manu, from Sanskrit, and create a Digest of Indian and Arabian Laws. Jones' final judicial project was leading the compilation of a Sanskrit "Digest of Hindu Law," with the original plan of translating the work himself. (17) After his death, the translation was completed by Henry Thomas Colebrooke. (18) He believed that Indians under British rule ought to “enjoy their own customs unmolested”, but neither colonial judges nor ordinary Indians had access to the sacred languages of Hindus and Muslims. They depended on the interpretations of pandits and maulvis, most of whom appeared eager to please the highest bidder.

Jones’s codification of religious laws made the process of delivering justice far more transparent, but also removed the need for any input from Indians.  All power now rested in the hands of Britons. A similar process played out in the field of Indology. Beyond the first close contacts between British Orientalists and local teachers, the discipline became an almost exclusive European enterprise. Orientalism divested Indians of the remnants of power they had within the colonial system.

In this light, the Palestinian Marxist author Edward Said, who gave a new meaning to the term Orientalism, argued that the aim of William Jones’s studies, and that of Orientalism in general, was “to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning”.

Jones was also not devoid of imperial prejudice. He argued: “I shall certainly not preach democracy to the Indians, who must and will be governed by absolute power." As a British judge, he scoffed at any political conception of Indianness; it was India’s historical accomplishments he thought profoundly admirable. He once wrote, “I never was unhappy in England, but I never was happy till I settled in India."

By 1794, Jones declared the new mission. His incomplete desiderata featured Panini’s grammar, the Vedas, the Puranas, and more. But tragedy struck, and within the year he was dead. The climate never agreed with him—and a grave was built for him in India. He once said, “The best monument that can be erected to a man of literary talents, is a good edition of his works." His widow published a collection, showcasing his legacy as the interpreter of India for the West. The West, sadly dismissed Jones, going down a path of degradation in a few years. And India, they decided, never could be great; For them, what Jones saw was a myth, and soon, the Raj arrived to destroy the legacy. But India fought back and secured its treasures.

____________________________

1. Edgerton, Franklin (2002) [1946]. "Sir William Jones, 1746–1794". In Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.). Portrait of Linguists. Vol. 1. Thoemmes Press. pp. 1–17.

2. Shore, John (1815). Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones. Hatchard. p. 52.

3. Cannon, Garland (August 1978). "Sir William Jones and Anglo-American Relations during the American Revolution". Modern Philology. 76 (1): 34.

4. Ibid, 76 (1): 36–37.

5. Ibid, 43–44.

6. Anthony, David W. (2010). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. p. 6

7. Ibid

8. Davis, Samuel; Aris, Michael (1982). Views of Medieval Bhutan: the diary and drawings of Samuel Davis, 1783. Serindia.

9. "Dictionary of Indian Biography" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Dictionary_of_Indian_Biography.djvu/431

10. Jones, Sir William (1824). Discourses delivered before the Asiatic Society: Miscellaneous papers, on the religion, poetry, literature, etc., of the nations of India. Printed for C. S. Arnold. p. 28.

11. Auroux, Sylvain (2000). History of the Language Sciences. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. p. 1156

12. Roger Blench, Archaeology and Language: methods and issues. In: A Companion To Archaeology. J. Bintliff ed. 52–74. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2004.

13. Campbell, Lyle; Poser, William (2008). Language Classification: History and Method. Cambridge University Press. p. 536

14. Bates, Crispin (1995). "Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry". In Robb, Peter (ed.). The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. p. 231.

15. Singh, Upinder (2004). The discovery of ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology. Permanent Black.

16. Rocher, Rosanne (October 1995). Cannon, Garland; Brine, Kevin (eds.). Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones, 1746-1794. NYU Press. p. 54.

17. Ibid, pp. 61–2.

18. Ibid, pp. 61–2.

* The breast description in Arthur W Ryder's translation (Act 1):

Beneath the barken dress

Upon the shoulder tied,

In maiden loveliness

Her young breast seems to hide,

As when a flower amid

The leaves by autumn tossed-

Pale, withered leaves-lies hid,

And half its grace is lost

© Ramachandran 

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.

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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