“In our conversations on the Vedas he never, as far as I recollect, defended the divine origin of his own sacred writings in the abstract, but he displayed great casuistic cleverness in maintaining that every argument that had ever been adduced in support of a supernatural origin of the Bible could be used with equal force in favor of a divine authorship of the Veda. His own ideas of the Veda were chiefly derived from the Upanishads, and he frequently assured me that there was much more of Vedic literature in India than we imagined. This Dvarka Náth Tagore was the father of Debendra Náth Tagore, the true founder of the Brahmo Samáj, who, in 1845, sent the four young Brahmans to Benares to copy out and study the four Vedas. Though Dvarka Náth Tagore was so far orthodox that he maintained a number of Brahmans, yet it was he also who continued the grant for the support of the Church, founded at Calcutta by Ram Mohun Roy. One letter written by Dvarka Náth Tagore from Paris to Calcutta in 1845, would supply the missing link between what was passing at that time in a room of a hotel on the Place Vendôme, and the resolution taken at Calcutta to find out, once for all, what the Vedas really are.
“In India itself the idea of a critical and historical study of the Veda originated certainly with English scholars. Dr. Mill once showed me the first attempt at printing the sacred Gâyatrî in Calcutta; and, if I am not mistaken, he added that unfortunately the gentleman who had printed it died soon after, thus confirming the prophecies of the Brahmans that such a sacrilege would not remain unavenged by the gods. Dr. Mill, Stevenson, Wilson, and others were the first to show to the educated natives in India that the Upanishads belonged to a later age than the hymns of the Rig-Veda, and likewise the first to exhibit to Ram Mohun Roy and his friends the real character of these ancient hymns. On a mind like Ram Mohun Roy’s the effect was probably much more immediate than on his followers, so that it took several years before they decided on sending their commissioners to Benares to report on the Veda and its real character. Yet that mission was, I believe, the result of a slow process of attrition produced by the contact between native and European minds, and as such I wished to present it in my address at the Oriental Congress.”
Footnotes to Chapter VI (VII):
The Importance of Oriental Studies
[1.] These lists of common Aryan words were published in the Academy, October 10, 1874, and are reprinted at the end of the next article “On the Life of Colebrooke.”
[2.] Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und Orientalischen Philologie in Deutschland, von Theodor Benfey. München, 1869.
[3.] Aristoteles’ Metaphysik, eine Tochter der Sânkhya-Lehre des Kapila, von Dr. C. B. Schlüter. 1874.
[6.] Academy, August 1, 1874.
[7.] I read yathâpûrve as one word.