Jain Spirit 2005 06 No22

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 68

HISTORY
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A RARE
GENIUS
n Jain Spirit Issue18 (March-May 2004) I discussed the scholarship of Maurice Bloomfield (1855-1928), the first American scholar of Jainism. Bloomfield was Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1881 until
1926. He was the author of many important studies of Jain narrative literature, including the first book on Jainism published in the United States, The Life and Stories of the Jaina Saviour Parçvanatha in 1919. Bloomfield was primarily a scholar of Vedic language and literature, and most of the graduate students he trained worked in the areas of Vedic and Hindu literature. Only one of the many students who earned a Ph.D. under Bloomfield continued his interest in the study of Jain narrative literature. This was W. Norman Brown (1892-1975).
philology and Sanskrit studies was small and closely knit. The intellectual agendas of the field closely overlapped with those of comparative philology and classics. It was assumed that graduate students already had a grounding in Latin and Greek for the classics, and French and German in order to be current with continental scholarship. They were then rigorously trained in Sanskrit as the essential tool for understanding India. The emphasis was on the study of the classical Indian texts in their original languages. Many early-twentieth-century scholars of India such as Bloomfield never went to the land of their studies. They perceived the gulf between their historical area of study and contemporary colonial India to be so great that they felt there was nothing to be gained from going to India. Nor did many of these scholars have anything other than at best a passing ability to read a
JOHN E. CORT
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Brown was educated in an era when the world of Indian or Personal & modern Indian vernacular language.