Charlotte Krause her Life and Literature

Author(s): Shreeprakash Pandey
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith

Page 14

Foreword
The German poet Heinrich Heine once declared : “Let the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English plunder India of her material wealth. We Germans would rather dip into her spiritual and intellectual riches.” As a rasika of Saṁskṛta poetry, Heine may have been familiar with Bhartřhari's epigramme which says that vidyā is the only form of wealth that does not diminish when distributed to others. And truly enough the 'plunder' of India's spiritual and intellectual riches by generations of German scholars did enrich both India and Germany.
The German encounter with Saṁskṛta language and literature gave rise to a number of disciplines like Indology, Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology and Religion. The efforts of the German and other Western scholars in systematic collection, preservation and study of manuscripts not only saved our precious heritage; these also made us aware of the vastness and variety of this heritage.
It is indeed gratifying that the Jaina community has always been conscious of the importance of the contributions to the study of the languages and literature of Jainism made by German scholars like Albrecht Weber, Hermann Jacobi, Ernst Leumann, Walther Schubring, Johannes Hertel, Helmuth von Glassenapp, Ludwig Alsdorf, Gustav Roth and Klaus Bruhn. Charlotte Krause belongs to this galaxy of savants. But in her case, Jainism did not remain just the subject of academic study; it became her own way of life.
Born at the turn of the last century in the city of Halle, Charlotte Krause attended the universities of Marburg, Tübingen and Leipzig. Initially she studied natural sciences, but soon was drawn to Indian languages, natably Saṁskṛta and the Prākṣtas. By the time she was thirty, she had established herself as a competent