Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

About 1150 we hear of Abu Saleh translating a work on the education of kings from Sanskrit into Arabic.[143]

Two hundred years later, we are told that Firoz Shah, after the capture of Nagarcote, ordered several Sanskrit works on philosophy to be translated from Sanskrit by Maulána Izzu-d-din Khalid Khani. A work on veterinary medicine ascribed to Sálotar,[144] said [pg 151] to have been the tutor of Suśruta, was likewise translated from Sanskrit in the year 1381. A copy of it was preserved in the Royal Library of Lucknow.

Two hundred years more bring us to the reign of Akbar (1556-1605). A more extraordinary man never sat on the throne of India. Brought up as a Muhammedan, he discarded the religion of the Prophet as superstitious,[145] and then devoted himself to a search after the true religion. He called Brahmans and fire-worshippers to his court, and ordered them to discuss in his presence the merits of their religions with the Muhammedan doctors. When he heard of the Jesuits at Goa, he invited them to his capital, and he was for many years looked upon as a secret convert to Christianity. He was, however, a rationalist and deist, and never believed anything, as he declared himself, that he could not understand. The religion which he founded, the so-called Ilahi religion, was pure Deism mixed up with the worship of the sun[146] as the purest and highest emblem of the Deity. Though Akbar himself could neither read nor write,[147] his court was the home of literary men of all persuasions. Whatever book, in any language, promised to throw light on the problems nearest to the emperor's heart, he ordered to be translated into Persian. The New Testament[148] was thus translated at his command; so were the Mahâbhârata, the Râmâyaņa, the Amarakosha,[149] and other classical [pg 152] works of Sanskrit literature. But though the emperor set the greatest value on the sacred writings of different nations, he does not seem to have succeeded in extorting from the Brahmans a translation of the Veda. A translation of the Atharva-veda[150] was made for him by Haji Ibrahim Sirhindi; but that Veda never enjoyed the same authority as the other three Vedas; and it is doubtful even whether by Atharva-veda is meant more than the Upanishads, some of which may have been composed for the special benefit of Akbar. There is a story which, though evidently of a legendary character, shows how the study of Sanskrit was kept up by the Brahmans during the reign of the Mogul emperors.

“Neither the authority (it is said) nor promises of Akbar could prevail upon the Brahmans to disclose the tenets of their religion: he was therefore obliged to have recourse to artifice. The stratagem he made use of was to cause an infant, of the name of Feizi, to be committed to the care of these priests, as a poor orphan of the sacerdotal line, who alone could be initiated into the sacred rites of their theology. Feizi, having received the proper instructions for the part he was to act, was conveyed privately to Benares, the seat of knowledge in Hindostan; he was received into the [pg 153] house of a learned Brahman, who educated him with the same care as if he had been his son. After the youth had spent ten years in study, Akbar was desirous of recalling him; but he was struck with the charms of the daughter of his preceptor. The old Brahman laid no restraint on the growing passion of the two lovers. He was fond of Feizi, and offered him his daughter in marriage. The young man, divided between love and gratitude, resolved to conceal the fraud no longer, and, falling at the feet of the Brahman, discovered the imposture, and asked pardon for his offences. The priest, without reproaching him, seized a poniard which hung at his girdle, and was going to plunge it in his heart, if Feizi had not prevented him by taking hold of his arm. The young man used every means to pacify him, and declared himself ready to do anything to expiate his treachery. The Brahman, bursting into tears, promised to pardon him on condition that he should swear never to translate the Vedas, or sacred volumes, or disclose to any person whatever the symbol of the Brahman creed. Feizi readily promised him: how far he kept his word is not known; but the sacred books of the Indians have never been translated.”[151]

We have thus traced the existence of Sanskrit, as the language of literature and religion of India, from the time of Alexander to the reign of Akbar. A hundred years after Akbar, the eldest son of Shah Jehan, the unfortunate Dárá, manifested the same interest in religious speculations which had distinguished his great [pg 154] grandsire. He became a student of Sanskrit, and translated the Upanishads, philosophical treatises appended to the Vedas, into Persian. This was in the year 1657, a year before he was put to death by his younger brother, the bigoted Aurengzebe. This prince's translation was translated into French by Anquetil Duperron, in the year 1795, the fourth year of the French Republic; and was for a long time the principal source from which European scholars derived their knowledge of the sacred literature of the Brahmans.

At the time at which we have now arrived, the reign of Aurengzebe (1658-1707), the cotemporary and rival of Louis XIV., the existence of Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature was known, if not in Europe generally, at least to Europeans in India, particularly to missionaries. Who was the first European, that knew of Sanskrit, or that acquired a knowledge of Sanskrit, is difficult to say. When Vasco de Gama landed at Calicut, on the 9th of May, 1498, Padre Pedro began at once to preach to the natives, and had suffered a martyr's death before the discoverer of India returned to Lisbon. Every new ship that reached India brought new missionaries; but for a long time we look in vain in their letters and reports for any mention of Sanskrit or Sanskrit literature. Francis, now St. Francis Xavier, was the first to organize the great work of preaching the Gospel in India (1542); and such were his zeal and devotion, such his success in winning the hearts of high and low, that his friends ascribed to him, among other miraculous gifts, the gift of tongues[152]—a gift never claimed by St. Francis himself. It is not, however, [pg 155] till the year 1559 that we first hear of the missionaries at Goa studying, with the help of a converted Brahman,[153] the theological and philosophical literature of the country, and challenging the Brahmans to public disputations.

The first certain instance of a European missionary having mastered the difficulties of the Sanskrit language, belongs to a still later period,—to what may be called the period of Roberto de Nobili, as distinguished from the first period, which is under the presiding spirit of Francis Xavier. Roberto de Nobili went to India in 1606. He was himself a man of high family, of a refined and cultivated mind, and he perceived the more quickly the difficulties which kept the higher castes, and particularly the Brahmans, from joining the Christian communities formed at Madura and other places. These communities consisted chiefly of men of low rank, of no education, and no refinement. He conceived the bold plan of presenting himself as a Brahman, and thus obtaining access to the high and noble, the wise and learned, in the land. He shut himself up for years, acquiring in secret a knowledge, not only of Tamil and Telugu, but of Sanskrit. When, after a patient study of the language and literature of the Brahmans, he felt himself strong enough to grapple with his antagonists, he showed himself in public, dressed in the proper garb of the Brahmans, wearing their cord and their frontal mark, observing their diet, and submitting even to the complicated rules of caste. He [pg 156] was successful, in spite of the persecutions both of the Brahmans, who were afraid of him, and of his own fellow-laborers, who could not understand his policy. His life in India, where he died as an old blind man, is full of interest to the missionary. I can only speak of him here as the first European Sanskrit scholar. A man who could quote from Manu, from the Purâņas, and even from works such as the Âpastamba-sûtras, which are known even at present to only those few Sanskrit scholars who can read Sanskrit MSS., must have been far advanced in a knowledge of the sacred language and literature of the Brahmans; and the very idea that he came, as he said, to preach a new or a fourth Veda,[154] which had been lost, shows how well he knew the strong and weak points of the theological system which he came to conquer. It is surprising that the reports which he sent to Rome, in order to defend himself against the charge of idolatry, and in which he drew a faithful picture of the religion, the customs, and literature of the Brahmans, should not have attracted the attention of scholars. The “Accommodation Question,” as it was called, occupied cardinals and popes for many years; but not one of them seems to have perceived the extraordinary [pg 157] interest attaching to the existence of an ancient civilization so perfect and so firmly rooted as to require accommodation even from the missionaries of Rome. At a time when the discovery of one Greek MS. would have been hailed by all the scholars of Europe, the discovery of a complete literature was allowed to pass unnoticed. The day of Sanskrit had not yet come.

The first missionaries who succeeded in rousing the attention of European scholars to the extraordinary discovery that had been made were the French Jesuit missionaries, whom Louis XIV. had sent out to India after the treaty of Ryswick, in 1697.[155] Father Pons drew up a comprehensive account of the literary treasures of the Brahmans; and his report, dated Karikal (dans le Maduré), November 23, 1740, and addressed to Father Duhalde, was published in the “Lettres édifiantes.”[156] Father Pons gives in it a most interesting and, in general, a very accurate description of the various branches of Sanskrit literature,—of the four Vedas, the grammatical treatises, the six systems of philosophy, and the astronomy of the Hindus. He anticipated, on several points, the researches of Sir William Jones.

But, although the letter of Father Pons excited a deep interest, that interest remained necessarily barren, as long as there were no grammars, dictionaries, and Sanskrit texts to enable scholars in Europe to study Sanskrit in the same spirit in which they studied Greek and Latin. The first who endeavored to supply this want was a Carmelite friar, a German of the name [pg 158] of Johann Philip Wesdin, better known as Paulinus a Santo Bartholomeo. He was in India from 1776 to 1789; and he published the first grammar of Sanskrit at Rome, in 1790. Although this grammar has been severely criticised, and is now hardly ever consulted, it is but fair to bear in mind that the first grammar of any language is a work of infinitely greater difficulty than any later grammar.[157]

We have thus seen how the existence of the Sanskrit language and literature was known ever since India had first been discovered by Alexander and his companions. But what was not known was, that this language, as it was spoken at the time of Alexander, and at the time of Solomon, and for centuries before his time, was intimately related to Greek and Latin, in fact, stood to them in the same relation as French to Italian and Spanish. The history of what may be called European Sanskrit philology dates from the foundation of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, in 1784.[158] It was through the labors of Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Colebrooke, and other members of that illustrious Society, that the language and literature of the Brahmans became first accessible to European [pg 159] scholars; and it would be difficult to say which of the two, the language or the literature, excited the deepest and most lasting interest. It was impossible to look, even in the most cursory manner, at the declensions and conjugations, without being struck by the extraordinary similarity, or, in some cases, by the absolute identity of the grammatical forms in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. As early as 1778, Halhed remarked, in the preface to his Grammar of Bengalí,[159] “I have been astonished to find this similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek; and these not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the mutuation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced; but in the main groundwork of language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such things as could be first discriminated on the immediate dawn of civilization.” Sir William Jones (died 1794), after the first glance at Sanskrit, declared that whatever its antiquity, it was a language of most 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 strong affinity. “No philologer,” he writes, “could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.”