Nahta Bandhu Abhinandan Granth

Author(s): Dashrath Sharma
Publisher: Agarchand Nahta Abhinandan Granth Prakashan Samiti

Page 592

Ruckert, Eugene Burnouf, Major General Alexander Cunningham, Franz Kielhorn, Hermann Jacobi, Major Seymour Sewell and many others will always be remembered by the students of Indian history with gratitude and admiration,1 But, as has been pointed out by Shri K. C. Varma and Pandit Bhagavaddatta, there was another band of scholars whose labours, though valuable in many respects, have been vitiated by political or religious or theological bias, and they were not objective in their studies hut were propagandists for the perpetuation of foreign domination of India and endeavoured to convert India to what they considered to be the "true faith", and it is rather strange that an appreciable number of Western authors who have written about India, during the last half a century or so, have been inspired mainly by the latter band. The very Boden Professorship of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford was founded by Colonel Boden with the special object of promoting the translation of the Scriptures into Sanskrit, so as "to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion" as has been specifically stated most explicitly in his Will (dated August 15, 1811). Professor H. H. Wilson, the first holder of the Boden Chair and the first noble English translator of the RV along with Sayana's commentary, wrote his book, 'The Leligions and Philosophical Systems of the Hindus', in order "to help candidates for a prize of 200/- given by John Muir, a well-known old Hailey man and great Sanskrit scholar, for the best refutation of the Hindu Religious system."4 Rudolf Roth, who jointly edited with Otto Böehtlingk, the famous St. Petersberg Sanskrit-German Thesaurus, gave out his considered belief that a conscientious European exegete may understand the Veda much more correctly and better than Sayana, and further gave his ruling as a "conscientious European", in his "search for the meaning which the poets themselves gave to their songs and phrases", that the "writings of Sayaṇa and of other commentators must not be an authority to the exegete, but merely one of the means of which he has to avail himself in accomplishment of his task..." The concrete result of the labours of this scholar was the Sanskrit Wörterbuch that has been held to this day as one of the most authoritative basis of modern Vedic exegesis.
1. K. C, Varma, Some Western Indologists and Indian Civilization, an article in "India's Contribution to World Thought and Culture", the Vivekananda Commemoration Volume, p. 165,
2. ibid. also Pandit Bhagavaddatta, Bharatavarṣa-kä Brhad Itihasa, Vol. I, pp. 52-71.
3. Monier Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Oxford, 1899, Preface to the New Edition, p. ix.
4. Eminent Orientalists, Madras, p. 72:
5. Theodor Goldstücker, Papini, Varanasi, 1965, p. 266,
इतिहास और पुरातत्त्व १०३
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