The European Discovery of India: Key Indological Sources of Romanticism,
ed.
Michael J. Franklin, 6 vols (London: Ganesha Publishing, 2001) ISBN : 1
86210 016 0.
'Indian writings 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.'
Warren Hastings's preface to Charles Wilkins, The
Bhagvat-Geeta (1785)
This coherent six-volume set assembles the key authentic literary and
devotional texts which accomplished Oriental renaissance in the West and
cultural revolution in India. The powerful combination of Governor-General
Hastings's Orientalist government policies and Sir William Jones's
long-held ambition to initiate Europe into the vast literary treasures of
the East inaugurated a series of translations from the Sanskrit which
radically adjusted metropolitan conceptions of Hindu culture. Jones's major
achievement here, a revolutionary contribution to Western Indomania, was
the translation of Kalidasa's Sacontalá (1789). The play concerns the
aesthetic and erotic entrancement of King Dushmanta by the beauty of
Sacontalá, the daughter of a Brahman sage and a heavenly courtesan, and the
level of European audience identification was quite remarkable. In
acknowledging the vital contribution of Jones's translations in the
construction of the Romantic mythical image of India, it must be remembered
that he was simultaneously reintroducing the natives to their own cultural
heritage.
>From the invaluable contributions of Charles Wilkins, one of the first
Europeans to learn Sanskrit, and earliest translator of the Mahabharata, in
the 1780s, to the vivid translations of Horace Hayman Wilson, the first
Oxford Professor of Sanskrit, in the first four decades of the nineteenth
century the connecting thread is the Asiatic Society of Bengal which
channelled the rediscovered knowledge to Europe. The comparative scientific
approach of Friedrich Schlegel's ground-breaking Über die Sprache und
Weisheit der Indier (1808), fostered three key areas of nineteenth-century
language research: the Comparative Linguistics of Franz Bopp, the
Historical Linguistics of Jakob Grimm, and the Typological Linguistics of
Wilhelm von Humboldt, revealing the extent of German scholarly and artistic
immersion in Indic studies. Gladwin's Asiatic Miscellany (1785) includes
some of Sir William Jones's odes addressed to Hindu deities in which
cultural difference and iconographic novelty intensify emotional
acknowledgement of close
relationship in a poetics of syncretism. Their valuable insights into the
substantial overlap of the artistic and the religious, the philosophic and
the literary underline their centrality in the emergence of Romanticism.
William Hodges's Travels in India (1793) also displays the comparatist
stance of his patron Hastings. His vigorous and impressionistic aquatints
reveal an India whose architectural genius was in no way inferior to the
classical tradition of Greece and Rome. With the re-publication of H.T.
Holebrooke's important Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus,
the set contains, inter alia, works by Wilkins, Jones, Colebrooke, and
Wilson, the four musketeers, as Raymond Schwab termed them, of British
Orientalism.
* includes scarce editions, rarely found even in major libraries
*
* accessible introductions situate the works in the light of recent
research
* important source materials for researchers in a range of traditional
disciplines and newly-hybridized area studies
Contents
Volume 1: i) Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna
and Arjoon (London: C. Nourse, 1785)
Wilkins was the first of the British Orientalists to learn Sanskrit, and
the
first to translate the Mahabharata. Sir William Jones had no doubts about
the scale of Wilkins's achievement, advising those who wished to 'form a
correct idea of Indian religion and literature' to begin by forgetting 'all
that had been written on the subject, by ancients or moderns, before the
publication of the Gita'. Hastings considered the Gita to be 'almost
unequalled in its sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction; a work
of
wonderful fancy'. The poets and theorists of early Romanticism, keen to
develop syncretic comparisons of Indian and Pythagorean metempsychosis and
of Vedic and Platonic thought in their synthesis of the Orient and the
Occident paid eloquent tribute to Wilkins's contribution to the Oriental
Renaissance.
ii) Charles Wilkins, The Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma
(Bath: Cruttwell, 1787)
This was one of the most widely circulated texts in Europe, with numerous
retranslations. Many of these fables had made their way to Europe
centuries
before Wilkins translated them from the Sanskrit, and their influence can
be
seen in the Arabian Nights, the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and the
Fables of La Fontaine. Sir William Jones, who also made his own
translation,
described the fables of Vishnu Sarma as 'the most beautiful, if not the
most
ancient collection of Apologues in the world'. Wilkins's translation
impressed Herder, who refashioned some of the ideas into didactic poems.
Volume 2: Francis Gladwin (ed.), The Asiatick Miscellany: consisting of
original productions, translations, fugitive pieces, imitations, and
extracts from curious publications (London: Wallis, 1787).
This London selected edition of the 1785 Calcutta first volume provides
fascinating insights into cultural life in colonial Bengal. Gladwin's
periodical included some of the earliest Anglo-Indian poetry, and it was
here that a number of Sir William Jones's 'Hymns to Hindu Deities'
(1784-88)
received their first publication. Inspired by his researches into Hinduism
and aimed at a wider readership, this series of odes, with their emphases
on
creativity and the nature of perception, anticipated, and helped to shape,
Romantic preoccupations with such themes. As McGann has made clear, Jones's
prefatory Argument to 'A Hymn to Náráyena' with its valuable insights into
the substantial overlap of the artistic and the religious, the philosophic
and the literary is in itself a seminal document in the history of
Romanticism.
Volume 3: i) Sir William Jones (trans.) Sacontalá; or, the Fatal Ring: an
Indian drama. By Calidas (1789) [repr. from Works (London: Stockdale and
Walker, 1807).]
This translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala was a revolutionary contribution
to Orientalism. Reviewers in Britain such as Mary Wollstonecraft fell under
its spell, but in Germany it caused a sensation. The play was for Herder
his
'indische Blume'; Schiller rhapsodized about Sacontala as the ideal of
feminine beauty; Novalis lovingly addressed his fiancée as 'Sakontala';
Friedrich Schlegel pronounced India as the source of all human wisdom; and
Goethe captured the essence of Sacontalá fever in the line: 'Nenn ich,
Sakontala, dich, und so ist Alles gesagt' (When I name you, Sacontalá,
everything is said). The Romantic image of India reflected India's own self
image. Jones's translation ensured that the Sacontalá represented the
capstone in the construction of the Romantic conception of India, helping
to
establish the work as a defining text of Indian civilization accessible to
all Indians.
ii) Sir William Jones (trans.) Gítagovinda (1789) [repr. with 'On the
Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus' from Works (London: Stockdale
and Walker, 1807).]
Similar cultural empathy marked Jones's translation of Jayadeva's
Gítagovinda from which the early German Romantics also imbibed an Indian
blend of mystic and sensual love. In his concern to represent to the West
the popular tradition of Hinduism in a more acceptable guise Jones turns to
this beautiful twelfth-century evocation of the love of Krishna and Radha.
The Gítagovinda and the Sacontalá were also major sources of the Romantic
Orientalism which flooded across Europe in the 1790s and the early decades
of the nineteenth century. In all respects Jones's translations reveal him
as a tactful mediator of Hindu culture, coping with skill and sensitivity
with those elements of Indian beliefs which even today might cause the
Westerner some difficulty. In fostering a Hindu cultural renaissance Jones
simultaneously transformed European public opinion towards India and the
way
India saw itself.
iii) William Hodges, Travels in India, During the Years 1780-83 (London:
printed for the author, 1793).
'It certainly is curious, and highly entertaining to an inquisitive mind,
to
associate with a people whose manners are more than three thousand years
old; and to observe in them that attention and polished behaviour which
usually marks the most highly civilised state of society.' One of the best
books of Indian antiquities produced in England at this period, this
contains Hodges's A Dissertation on the Prototypes of Architecture, Hindoo,
Moorish and Gothic, his comparative treatise on architecture which had also
benefited from Hastings's encouragement. Hodges argued that non-classical
architectural traditions are not inferior copies, but 'the spontaneous
produce of genius in different countries, the necessary effects of similar
necessity and materials'. Hodges's importance as a painter lies in his
marriage of classical approaches to landscape composition and the aesthetic
of the Romantic picturesque, his narrative style sensitively combined
verbal
and visual imagery to set a new and high standard of intellectual and
cultural empathy for future travel-writing.
Volume 4: i) Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, 'On The Language and
Wisdom of the Indians' (1808) [repr. from The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous
Works of F. von Schlegel. Translated from the German by E. J. Millington.
(London: Bohn, 1849).]
Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel formally theorized German Romanticism
between the pages of the Athenäum; 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads, was
also the year of Athenäumsfragment 116, in which Friedrich defined the
progressive and universal character of Romantic poetry as the apotheosis of
process. Friedrich Schlegel's interest in India had been stimulated by
Herder and Friedrich Maier, and he learned Sanskrit with the help of
Alexander Hamilton, a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. This
scholarly and scientific treatise represents the fruit of intense study.
The
first section, an examination of Sanskrit, lays the foundation of
comparative grammar and linguistics. A survey of Indic philosophy follows,
revealing Schlegel's awareness of the profundity of Vedic thought. The
third
part contains some of Schlegel's most important thinking upon the history
and development of mankind. It was their reading of this text that inspired
A.W. Schlegel and Franz Bopp, the two central founders of Sanskrit
philology, to immerse themselves in Indic studies.
ii) Horace Hayman Wilson (trans.) The Mégha Duta; or, Cloud Messenger;
a Poem By Cálidása Translated into English verse, with notes and
illustrations: by Horace Hayman Wilson, etc. (London: Black, Parry & Co.,
1814).
Another work of Kalidasa which fascinated German Romanticism, and enchanted
Goethe in his later years in its poignant treatment of the themes of exile
and separation. In his Meghaduta Kalidasa created a new and much-imitated
genre, the dutakavya, to present the haunting mood of love-in-separation.
During the rainy season the lover sends a message to his beloved by means
of
a cloud. The journey to be traversed by the cloud-messenger is also
travelled by the lover in imaginative wish-fulfilment. It is a symbolic and
inherently sexualized landscape, the product of the lover's fixated and
frustrated desires, and by extension, a species of consolation. Rivers,
mountains, cities, birds, foliage, and flowers all turn their amorously
eloquent eyes skyward to attract and court the attentions of the reviving
and fertilizing cloud. The genre permits Kalidasa to furnish vibrant
descriptions of the lands and cities traversed by the cloud-messenger and
of
the lovelorn state of the lady when the messenger finally arrives. H.H.
Wilson, a surgeon in the East India Company, and secretary of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal, became the first Oxford professor of Sanskrit in 1832,
admired and emulated Jones as scholar and as literary translator.
Volume 5: Horace Hayman Wilson (trans.) The Vishnu Purána, A System of
Hindu Mythology and Tradition, translated from the original Sanscrit, and
illustrated by notes derived chiefly from other Puránas (London: John
Murray,1840).
The texts which Wilson made available in the secular public domain
simultaneously encouraged the revitalizing of Hindu literature and
philosophy among the contemporary Indian intelligentsia and contributed to
the medievalizing Indophile atmosphere of German Romanticism. Wilson was
fascinated by the 'perplexing labyrinth, those dark passages and cumbrous
obstructions that obscured the history of India between the Vedas and the
rise of the Muslims'.This first translation of one of the earliest of the
eighteen Puranas deals with creation myths, the personification of natural
phenomena, and the elemental forces which animate them. Although it
examines
and personifies such central concepts such as maya (illusion), dama
(self-discipline), dhrti (fortitude), ksama (tolerance), moksa
(liberation),
its primary focus remains the praise of Visnu, rendering it a key text of
Vaisnava devotion. Wilson's cultural vision of Orientalism was an inclusive
one; it embraced a veneration for the indigenous Indian tradition but
appreciated that intellectual and social renaissance in Bengal might be
predicated upon a fusion of European and Asian thought.
Volume 6: Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Essays on the Religion and Philosophy
of the Hindus (London: Williams and Norgate, 1858).
Colebrooke arrived in India in 1783, the same year as Jones, and was
appointed Professor of Sanskrit and Hindu Law at the College of Fort
William
in 1801. The product of meticulous research, Schwab described this text as
one 'that has not become outdated after more than a century of admiration'.
The volume includes his 1804 paper, 'On the Vedas, or Sacred Writings of
the
Hindus', which opened up new vistas for Indologists in Europe and helped
re-establish Hindu self-esteem in the subcontinent. For many European
thinkers Hindu idealism outshone its Greek counterpart, and Colebrooke
played a key part in the growth of Indian thought in Western awareness.
According to Halbfass, 'Colebrooke's presentation of the classical systems
of Indian philosophy remained unsurpassed for the better part of the
nineteenth century', and the volume was much admired both in Britain and on
the Continent for its clarity and precision.
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