..before the arrival of the pioneering Orientalist Sir William Jones in Calcutta in 1783, there was almost complete ignorance in Europe about India’s classical literature. There began a stumbling progress that led to the translation of passages from the most prominent ancient Indian writers: Vyasa, to whom is attributed the Mahabharata; Valmiki, author of the Ramayana; and the greatest of ancient Indian playwrights, Kalidasa, who is to Sanskrit what Shakespeare is to English. Jones himself believed that Sanskrit was “more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.” Yet within 50 years, the same East India Company that had sent Jones out to India had lost interest in learning from Indian literature. By 1835, the high tide of Victorian self-confidence and narrow-mindedness, Lord Macaulay would write in his notorious Minute on Indian Education that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Both Sanskrit and Persian were removed from the curriculum, and English was made the language of both education and government. Macaulay’s successors, colonial and post-colonial, have done remarkably little to reverse this situation. I suspect that the job of researching and explaining this literature probably needs to be done by scholars from the sub-continent. I am not sure it is fair to say there was no interest in Britain in Sanskrit and Persian, however. Anthony Eden, long-term cabinet member and Prime Minister for two years was awarded a Double First at Oxford for his degree in Sanskrit and Persian.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 23:35:43 +0000