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A Summary
INDOLOGICAL STUDIES IN GERMANY (Past and Present)
When in modern times Europeans "reached India in great numbers to trade, interest in India and her culture was awakened. Switzerland, Austria and Germany never had any colonial aspirations in India, yet scholars from these countries contributed a great deal to Indology.
The German missionary H. Roth (1620-1668) seems to have been the first European to write a Sanskrit grammar which, however, was not printed. Two other Catholic missionaries deserve mention in this connection. E. Hanxleden came to Kerala in 1699 and stayed there until his death in 1732. He was instructed in Sanskrit and Malayalam by two Nambūdrīs. He wrote a Sanskrit grammar, a Malayalam dictionary, and also composed hymns and poems in Malayalam. J. P. Wesdin, who took on the name of Fr. Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo (1748-1806), was an Austrian who stayed on the Malabar coast for thirteen years. He wrote two Sanskrit grammars which were printed in Rome in 1804.
Missionaries were also the first to take an interest in Dravidian languages. B. Ziegenbalg (1682-1719) wrote a Tamil grammar. J. P. Fabricius (1711-1791) compiled a Tamil dictionary. Kannada and Malayalam too owe a standard dictionary to two missionaries. F. Kittel (1832-1903) and H. Gundert (1814-1893) published dictionaries in these languages, which are still in use today. Another missionary, E. Trumpp (1828-1885), worked on Sindhi and Pushto.
These authors, however, did not make a great impact in Europe. It was only in the 19th century, after Sir William Jones' translation of 'Sakuntala' appeared in a German rendering, that thinkers of the Romantic Movement were impressed by Indian thought and literature. Two of the most influential disseminators of the ideas of that movement were August Wilhelm von Schlegel and his brother Friedrich. Both learned Sanskrit, A. W. von Schlegel when he was 51 years of age. When the first chair of Indology was established at Bonn University in 1818, A. W. von Schlegel became the first professor of Sanskrit. He set up a printing press and printed the Bhagavadgītā in Devanagari letters together with a Latin translation.
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